Assorted Ficlets
by purplegirl761
Summary: From humble beginnings to unexpected heroics (and beyond), behold: the ups and downs of Dr. Drakken, mad scientist extraordinaire. Will include pre-series, post-series, an origin story for Shego, my first ever attempt at D/S, and other random fun. Rating is for a few specific chapters; most are K Plus.
1. Coming of Age

**~Well, I'm back, everybody. :) This new story is going to be more along the lines of _Work in Progress: Study of an Evil Genius_ \- a lot of a little vignettes that have some connection but can mostly all stand alone. Most will focus on Drakken and/or Shego, but I have plans for some Kim, some Motor Ed, some Hank Perkins. . . should be fun.**

 **Quite a few will take place in the what-if universe created by the last chapter of _Work in Progress_ \- because it's just too darn enjoyable to picture Drakken as an uncle. However, there _will_ be one D/S story (as an experiment), so don't go anywhere, hardcore shippers!**

 **No real particular order to these. . . this one deals with seventeen-year-old Drew Lipsky on a very important day in his life. ~**

1\. Coming of Age

 _The Middleton Institute of Science and Technology._

Drew Lipsky grinned a secret grin down at the block letters. The pamphlet he held boasted bright, happy colors that said science was fun without making it look like a kiddie playplace.

Not that there was necessarily anything wrong with kiddie playplaces. Ball pits were marvelously fun to jump around in, as long as you could be scientifically certain no one was watching you.

Yes. _Scientifically_. Drew hugged the pamphlet to his chest in delight. That was the whole point now, the answer to everything.

After thirteen years of struggling through vocabulary words that reversed themselves somewhere between his brain and his pencil and PE exercises that left him panting on the sidelines, Drew Lipsky had finally made it into the college of his choice! There were accomplished scientists there, _wonderful_ scientists, and their affirmation of his genius would trump everyone else's word on him. He'd be able to ignore random bullies and unsympathetic language arts teachers as if they were nothing more than a vague, unpleasant odor.

If _they affirm me._

Drew squirmed a little inside the scratchy seams of his new dress shirt. Mother had worked so hard to be able to buy him new clothes for the tour, and the cut did seem to pad his scrawny shoulders out a little, expand the recess of his chest. Drew knew he had absolutely no reason to complain.

Except - boy, did this thing itch! Still, it was better by far than wearing one of Eddy's hand-me-downs that his _younger_ cousin outgrew at age twelve. Sweat stains in the pits and everything. Yeccch!

Not that Drew wasn't well on his way to staining his own.

Sweat was starting to seep through the lines on his palms, too, and he released the right one's grip to glance down at it. Smudges of black and smears of red threw a sharp spotlight on just how pale and tiny his hands were.

The ink had run. Cheap ink. Was that an ominous, foreboding omen of forbodance?

No, no, no, _no_. Drew shook his half-grown shag of protective hair back over his neck. No - undoubtedly the grand people of the Institute had just spent so much of their budget on _the_ most up-to-date science equipment that they had to skimp on their regular old boring printers. A penny saved was. . . one more penny that you hadn't spent.

There was a catchier way of putting that.

Then again, maybe it _was_ an omen. Right at that moment, a burly hand dropped onto Drew's shoulder with so much gravitational force he was sure the joint would dislodge, fall right out of place to somewhere around his rib cage. And his arms wobbled and klutzed and ganglied enough when they were properly aligned.

 _Please, please, please, please, please, please, PLEASE let it be Eddy!_

It wasn't. The laughter that speared toward him was too ugly to be his cousin's dopey "huh-huh-huh." Drew looked up into the ruthless faces of Carl Thompson and his band of thugs. Guys who had probably earned Punch-a-Nerd scholarships to Macho U, where they would study Having Muscles, Applying Aftershave, Doing Everything Smooth.

A couple of lavishing girls hung on each of Carl's arms like it was a symbiotic relationship. Good grief, had they missed the Women's Lib movement completely? His mother could have taken them all out with her purse.

Which would have been the most humiliating thing that could ever happen.

 _Have to get out of here. How do I get out?!_

The possibilities swiped at each other in his mind, and Drew came up empty. Even as he commanded himself to _remain calm_ , his very hemoglobin froze until he fully expected his skin to turn blue.

Carl took a step toward Drew, who instinctively backed up against the bank of lockers until a combination lock pressed into his spine. It was the daily (sometimes hourly) test of whether he could firm himself to the floor as they swagger-approached, and Drew always flunked.

"How are you doing, _Drewbie_?" Carl asked. The nickname was embarrassing enough out of his mother's sweet mouth, and coming from the guy who secondhandedly taught Drew every curse word he knew?

Unconscionable.

Drew pressed two fingers to his throat, at the approximate site of his vocal chords, stretching them to prevent their cracking toward child-levels. "Leave me alone, Carl," he growled in his best guttural attempt to measure up.

"Leave me alone, Carl," one of the nose-in-the-air girls mimicked. Her shrill snort bore a decided resemblance to Miss Piggy.

What about what he'd just said was funny?

"Looks like little Drewbie's all gussied up for something," Fred added. He reached out and pinched Drew's arm. His fingers could have wrapped around the entire thing. . . maybe twice.

A look that Drew recognized glittered through Carl's eyes.

Drew's mouth went dry, sandy. The Sahara Desert. Without the camels.

 _Not a swirlie. Not today. I have to look my best to visit the Middleton Institute of Science and Technology!_

He'd heard some of the students there referred to it as "MIST," but that was _far_ too unprofessional for Drew's taste. The unabbreviated Institute would, after all, be relying on their first impression of him to assign him classes, put him on the path to success, assure him a high-paying job in one of the country's top laboratories.

Drew dug his fingers into the locker's vents. A man - or the rough equivalent - _needed_ that job so he could prove his tormentors wrong and kick their humiliation back at them, so he could contribute to the world by finding the cure for cancer or something.

So he could take care of his mother. Especially since Da - _Richard_ had quit paying child support about six months back, apparently under the impression that Drew was already eighteen.

 _Because he forgot my birthdate._

Drew's entire body shut down, the way it always did when _that_ came up. It gave Carl just long enough to snatch his precious pamphlet away and hold it out of his reach.

"'Middleton Institute of Science and Technology,'" Jason read from behind Carl's elbow. His eyebrows puckered at the pamphlet like it had been written by the ancient Babylonians. "What's _this_ about?"

Then they just stood there, all of them, telegraphing, _You're not as smart as you think you are, Lipsky. Not as smart as us. You haven't even figured out how worthless you are yet._ It was a message Drew had heard so many times, he suddenly saw no reason not to scream the inverse right in their faces.

"Give! That! Back!" Drew pounded on Carl's enviable pecs with one fist. His voice was climbing up the scale, and he tugged at his collar to guide it back down. "Ngggh! Aggh! Grrk!"

No sooner had fifth-grade Drew finally gotten rid of his stutter than the habit of spitting nonsense syllables moved in to take its place. It had done nothing for the mocking except to make it worse. Very unhelpful.

Especially with Carl and his cockiness bumping him until he cowered with a locker knob mingling with his vertebrae. "I wouldn't expect _you_ to understand," Drew said, straining for a bit of cockiness himself. " _I_ have a scholarship."

"So do we." Carl's gaze sank its fangs into Drew.

Not really. Gazes didn't have fangs. It was a - a - a - well, Drew couldn't remember the proper English-class term for it, but it was something cool, like the way a poet would talk.

Ah. _Now_ he knew why he'd never tried to invert their insults back to them. He could barely do it without crying.

Drew squinched up his eyes to hold his tears hostage. Could tell a few were plotting an escape, though. He made sure to scoff when he said, " _Sports_ scholarships. You're going to go throw balls through hoops and kick them into goals and run around head-butting each other, but you'll never understand what chemical constructs make up that ball or the laws of physics that allow them to bounce."

Carl crumbled the pamphlet easily with his Hand Of Strength. Really, how much more would it take to break Drew's whole lightweight self? "Why the heck would we need to?" he said.

Ulp. _That's the question, isn't it?_

Drew heard his heartbeat cresting in his ears like waves on the beach. It lost its control of his lips, however, to the fuse snaking its way through his insides. Next thing he heard was himself saying, "To show you're as smart as I am."

"Oh, yeah? Wanna read for us, Backwards-Brain?" Alexander called.

Carl shushed him with a finger. And, not two seconds later, he flung out an arm and hoisted Drew from the ground by the part of his shirt that Drew thought was called the "lapel" in fancy circles. Blobs of paint flaked off the decrepit locker and tumbled past his tag to prickle at his back.

When Carl spoke, it seemed to be squeezing through pit-viper slits. "Oh, I understand that you're jealous, Drewbie. Not everybody has what it takes to win an _athletic_ scholarship. And not everybody has parents who'd be able to pay if you didn't."

Parent _s_.

The pain was so instantaneous and so bad that Drew was half-prepared for death at any moment. Around him, the air went silent. As in, no giggles. As in even Carl's loyal little cronies wondering if he might have gone too far this time. One of the girls actually let go of his biceps.

In the silence, Drew caught a glimpse of his shadow on the wall, lengthening in the mid-afternoon sun that lingered more often these June days. Broken by hulking lockers and trash cans and the promise of ten big fists. Contrary to popular belief, he wasn't scared of his own shadow - there was nothing scary about it, and that was what scared him.

"Seriously, Carl." Second-in-Command Jason tugged at the brute's perfect sleeve, the one that fit him like they were two halves of the same thing and was definitely not a hand-me-down from anyone except maybe Babe Ruth. (That guy was probably dead by now, but he was the only athlete Drew could think of.) "Track meet's in, like, five minutes. Why don'tcha just dump Drewbie in the trash can and be done with it?"

Drew hated himself - and everyone around him - for the fear he could feel springing his eyes. He was too weak to stop them from wandering down to the dress shirt now clenched in the Hand of Strength, checking it for spots or rips or anything else that might spoil its newness.

"No!" he hollered. "Not the trash can! Not the trash can!"

Grins, shark-esque things that were ready to chow down.

 _Errgghookkk! Why did I say that?_

"Did - did I say 'trash can'?" Drew said, pitch snapping into fragments that went up too high. "I mean 'locker.' Not the locker! Don't stuff me in my locker!"

Evidently these people weren't as gullible as Mother, because Carl wrenched both of Drew's wrists back to meet at his tailbone and lifted him as if he were a feather pillow straight off the floor. Drew paddled at nothing with one foot (that was admittedly too small for his leg to do much good), but the shoving and the shifting didn't cease until he was straddling the powder-white letters on the green trash bin proclaiming it an "Official Waste Disposal Unit."

 _OWDU?_ Drew thought - to distract himself from the imminent mess. He had trouble balancing his focus between more than one thing at a time, and that could come in handy sometimes.

So could the school bell. It shrieked right as Carl was heaving one of Drew's legs over the side, accompanied by the words, "Last call for 4:00 Track and Field!"

It was as though they'd vaporized. The hall was abruptly empty, and Drew was hanging sideways, the flesh on his fingertips tingly as the sticky-uppy plastic from the bin's lip dug into them. The smell of overripe grapefruit walloped him in the nostrils.

 _This is. . . preferable. Only problem is, I have to move to get down._

And he didn't move very well.

Sheesh, he must have looked so much like a little stray puppy stuck in the fur-matting rain, complete with the general stench and the frozen cringe. Drew couldn't decide which was scaring him more, hanging on or letting go, and there was no one around to take a public-opinion poll.

Or, you know, rescue him.

Drew seethed, glasses biting into the spot where his eyebrows met. _Man, if I ever get buff someday. . . Carl and those guys will be sorry! They'll PAY!_

It wasn't the first time he'd imagined revenge, but it was one of the most vivid. Drew could lessen his chances of sobbing by twenty-five percent just by picturing Carl Thompson kneeling in front of a giant robotic arm that would give _him_ the Wedgie of the Year. Fred getting acne laser-blasted onto his face and whiskers blasted _off_. Alexander discovering what it was like to have something more powerful than you close enough to static-shock you and knowing it could do so much worse than that.

Jason. . . maybe nothing much for Jason, since he'd sort of stopped Carl from going anywhere with the parent thing. Maybe he'd just have to wash all the test tubes for a week or something.

After all, this was the Enlightened Eighties! Anything was possible.

 _You just keep remembering that, and you won't cry._

Yes. Well. That was all proton-positive, but Drew didn't like how close to a mad scientist he was suddenly sounding.

"Drew Lipsky?" said a woman's voice.

Drew gasped and prepared to be eaten alive.

 _Please don't let it be Mrs. Hart! I'll be in detention for the rest of the millennium!_

Drew glanced up into a wonderfully shiny gold name badge that read "Lauren Daniels," pinned to the front of the woman's white top. The letters "MIST" marched across the front, but the full versions of the words were vertically arranged below the big letters. That was acceptable.

Oh, _right_. Lauren Daniels. Of the Middleton Institute of Science and Technology Reception Committee.

(Actually, Drew had no idea whether they employed the term "Reception Committee." It had such a professional trill in his head, though, that he chose to use it.)

Oh, no - and here he was balancing on the edge of a trash bin, like he was about to vomit his guts. Oh, no - oh, this _couldn't_ look good!

"I'm not drunk!" Drew hastened to clarify as he swung his leg out of reach of the garbage and back over the side, pulled himself upright. The scramble to his feet was a little too soon, however, and he wound up goggling against the wall, which didn't help validate his non-intoxicated claim. "I've never drunk an alcoholic beverage in my life! Well, I did eat a strawberry that I think was a little fermented once. . ."

He stopped. The woman had her fingers pressed together over her lips as if she were snuffing out a smile. Not a scornful one, though. A motherly one, despite the fact that she could have only been about twenty-five. That was old enough to be a mother, but not _his_ mother. (Drew knew more about those things now.)

On the whole, Lauren Daniels appeared kindly enough that Drew zipped up to meet her. At five-foot-nine, he towered over her, but she had that kind of 180-degree angle to her posture that made a person appear taller. One of the 490,007 goals he hadn't achieved yet. Why bother around here? The straighter you stood, the harder you fell.

Still, maybe that was all about to change. Carl and those guys would go off to Basketball School - or whatever - and learn absolutely nothing while he was bettering mankind, and with any luck their paths would never cross again.

Lauren's gaze, clinical as a doctor's, swept Drew from the waves of hair that wouldn't quite tame to the brown dress shoes straight from Goodwill. His greatest hope was either that she saw the _please-rescue-me_ begging in his own eyes, or that she didn't - there was no verdict in his frozen-up thoughts. And, of course, they both paled in comparison to the hope that his slacks weren't unzipped.

They must not have been, because Lauren stuck out a hand and introduced herself as Lauren Daniels and said some other things that Drew missed because he was busy studying the happy helices of DNA twisting on her pants.

Those pants turned and swished down the hall, and Drew had to follow the call of science. Was this how literary rats felt when literary pipers played them a literary song and they fumbled mindlessly into a literary river?

Who knew? Literature was never his strong point.

And none of that mattered once they were outside and in front of a scientific-looking, slate-colored van, with the kind of bowl seats Drew wasn't certain were groovy anymore (or, for that matter, if anyone still _said_ "groovy"). But they were cozy, and he nestled into one in the backseat. Clipped his seat belt on. Took the hand, all slim veins and agile muscles, that extended toward him from the driver's seat.

"Nice to meet you, Drew," said the tanned guy behind the wheel. "I'm Eric."

What a nice name. Strong and masculine. Drew couldn't imagine even the most determined bully fashioning some nasty nickname out of _Eric_.

 _Not like Drewwwwwwwwbie._

Drew almost pulled his knees up in front of him to clutch before it struck him like the rays of sunlight (precisely positioned to stab his eyeballs) how utterly childish that would be. He stood on the cusp on manhood, right here and right now. Only what kind of man shaved just once a week. . . and with his mother's lady-razor?

He'd have to get one of his own for college.

Yeah. Now was the time to man up, own up, grow up. Mother would _not_ be tossed aside like an empty soda can someone at least should have bothered to recycle, not again. She'd done such a superb job raising him alone for the last nine-and-a-half years she deserved to be able to retire youngish and be well-cared-for the rest of her life.

Her pain and his were as tightly woven as those double helices - maybe if Drew could get rid of hers, some of his would decrease, too. He'd had more than enough.

Drew spent the short trip with his face pressed to the window, one hand spread like an awning over his forehead to keep the sun from blinding him. And the brain that worked just _fine_ , no matter what darn old Alexander said, was churning out a plan in easy steps.

 _Step One: Use your adult voice. It impresses people, and no one will mistake you for a twelve-year-old._

 _Step Two: Ask questions. Make sure you get all the rules straight so you can't break them by accident._

 _Step Three: Be pleasant. Be patient. Keep thanking them._

 _Step Four: Let_ them _be the ones to mention your grades. Arrogance is for Carl and those guys, and you're so much better than them._

There! That was a good plan. Settled Drew's nerves. Only a few jolts over potholes in the road had his stomach clenching, and that was a purely physical reaction.

When the van came to a stop, Drew gasped again - a high, fluttery sort of sound that defied Step One. It wasn't fear, not quite. His fingers tingled and didn't start threading through the black straggles hanging down his neck. His chest was swept with something like nostalgia, but for something he'd never had.

Colleges didn't have appendages, and they couldn't offer you an embrace. And yet _Come here and let me give you a hug_ , was Drew's immediate impression. Every windowsill, stair step, and doorknob was both instantly familiar and excitingly new.

No building had ever pumped his energy up to a sugar-worthy rush before. His own house, as shrunken and skinny as Drew himself, was welcoming, but it tucked into itself with shame and beckoned him to do likewise. This campus proclaimed, _Come in, Drew! You belong here!_

 _Wow!_

Up the delightful steps, through the perfect door, into a carpeted hall. Drew was convinced that (A) he'd never get his mouth closed again, and (B) he'd stumbled upon a long-lost shrine to Knowledge (with a capital K).

Eric stopped midway through one long stride to toss a grin back at Drew. "You like, huh?" he asked.

Drew nodded, chin still hanging to his top button. No words were necessary - which was good because all the phonics he'd ever learned had vanished from his brain with - with - with - with -

What was that thing called? Excitement? Nah, that wasn't grand enough. . .

"You'll be getting a tour of the main building first," Lauren said. "The dining hall, the workout room. . ."

That would have been the appropriate time to flex a bicep. If he'd had one.

"Where's the lab?" Drew asked. His adult-voice teetered precariously, and he cleared his throat twelve times to strengthen it. It was hard to stay calm when you could already feel drool forming on your chops.

Lauren's eyes twinkled at him. "We have a community computer lab in this building. Each of the dorms has their own smaller individual lab. You're in Da Vinci."

Da Vinci. The man who had probably accomplished more by the time he was seventeen than most people did in eight entire decades. It was so fitting, and that did things for his self-esteem that bulging biceps never could have.

The workout room wasn't really all that special, either. Some pulley-machines. Some treadmills. Some bikes that went nowhere. Drew had the mechanics of all of those figured out by age six, back when Richard used to take him to the gym with him sometimes.

Drew blinked himself dry. Moving on.

All the furniture in the computer lab looked like it had been filled in with a blue crayon, the first-ever proof he'd seen that something could be All Business and still seem warm and inviting. Drew plopped himself down in a state-of-the-art wheeled chair and resisted the very, very strong urge to twirl in it. He was above such juvenile nonsense now.

Man, computers had _shrunk_ over the years. (Or had they _shrank_? _Shrinked_ , perhaps?) They'd been compressed (ah, see, that was much better!) down to a square screen small enough to actually fit on a desktop and a chunky prism that could be stored underneath.

Fascinating. Drew ran a finger down that prism and longed to open it up and study its circuitry. Eric and Lauren were already looking at their watches, though, so he gave it a pat, promised it _soon_ , and hurried to catch up with them.

The whole walk to the dining hall (which sounded so much more elegant than a cafeteria), Drew skittered to keep up, holding fast to Steps Two and Three. Especially Two. He never wanted anyone in this beautiful place to get mad at him.

"Well, since you've already brought it up," Lauren said, a soft laugh sparkling in her eyes again, "there's no alcohol allowed on campus. Students who are of age may drink _off_ campus, but they can't bring any back where their underage friends could get it."

Drew bobbed his head, which was already spinning with something that had passed excitement about three halls back. "Yes. Of course, of course. That makes perfect sense! And you don't have to worry. I'm not old enough to drink. I'm not even old enough to smoke."

 _Why did I just divulge that?_ He had the sinking feeling he might as well have just stuck his thumb in and started sucking.

"Not that I would smoke anyway," Drew continued. The sentences panted, exhausted, but they had to press on, had to cover all traces of the kid who was still all arms and pimpled chin. "My cousin tried that once when we were _kids_ \- "

Ugh, that was the _wrong_ word for his audio to squeak on.

"- and he coughed until he - until he - he - he -" Drew hesitated, unable to recall the medical term for reverse digestion and too embarrassed to use any of the slang ones - "well, he coughed a lot," he finished stupidly.

Lauren was still looking at him as if she wanted to adopt him. "You don't strike me as the rule-breaking kind, Mr. Lipsky."

Hold up! _Mr._? And her grin wasn't sarcastic.

 _Ipooka_ , was all that came through Drew's tangled synapses.

Before he could plug them back in the right slots the way he would with the fuse box back at home that was always burning out, the shoes in front of him stopped. Drew screeched to a halt of his own that pitched him forward. Hands fumbling for something to grab - _do NOT fall_ \- _do NOT fall_ \- grabbing something - twisting it - spilling into a room.

Staying upright. That was the most important part. . . oh, _good_ ness!

This had to be the dining hall, which did look a lot like an upgraded version of a cafeteria. The starkness of the white walls almost burned, especially compared to Middleton High's, which were yellow and age-touched like some weird great-uncle's knuckles. Stainless steel trays were stacked in perfect rows at the end of a long line of options. No poisonous mystery meat fumes hung in the air.

It couldn't have been any more modern if they were serving astronaut food - which Drew had heard was pretty disgusting, anyway.

He hadn't realized he'd breathed "Wow," until Eric was draping an arm around him. "Pretty nice, huh?"

Drew agreed, ducking out from under that arm. It was so big and tough and male, the type that he was accustomed to being pounded with. "I'll get to eat here _every day_?" he asked.

"And how," Eric said. "You could use a little meat on your bones, Drew."

Drew scowled. He was entirely ungrateful for the reminder his reflection in the glass sneeze guard was already giving him. How it was supposed to keep you from sneezing, he'd never figured out.

Could his future truly include good labs, a good dining hall, and no bullies? Had the Law of Infinite Probability finally tipped in his favor?

"Is the food. . . good?" Drew said, just to show that he wasn't completely naive, that he was aware appearances could theoretically be deceiving.

Eric gave the dining hall a sweep with his eyes, which could sweep quicker and happier than a broom. "Well, it isn't exactly Mama's home cooking. Not that you would expect it to be, right?"

Drew let out a snort full of purpose - unfortunately, purpose got a little, erm, gooey. Mother sure made some fantastic lasagna.

"But I can personally guarantee it's a hundred times better than that junk they're serving you in high school right now." Eric looked at the dining hall so lovingly, Drew would have bet he _wouldn't_ have minded taking a broom to it.

Well, it had some loyal devotees at least. Then again, so did punk rock. . .

Drew crossed his fingers and stuck them in his back pockets. Much as he'd be glad to be out from under Mother's roof, he would miss her cooking.

And a few - dozen - other things.

"So who am I rooming with?" Drew asked as they entered Da Vinci dorm. It was decorated with wallpaper that looked splotched on purpose, and the ceilings were high in a way that made Drew stamp his feet to create echoes. He could get _used_ to this place.

Lauren glanced at him over her ruffled shoulder. "I'm glad you asked," she said. "Our enrollment rates have skyrocketed since last year. We're hoping to expand soon, but until then, some of the larger dorms are being asked to double up."

Double up? All Drew could picture was squaring an integer.

"There'll be four of you," Lauren explained. She had yet to sigh or groan or scrub at her temples.

"Oh." Drew knocked his fingertips together. _Three_ other boys? His vision of a quiet, distraction-free workplace was growing dimmer. . . or was that the flickering bulb overhead?

 _For Da Vinci's sake, Drew,_ he told himself, _you survived sharing a tent with Eddy, remember? No three other boys could be as loud, rowdy, and obnoxious as_ him _! They could even be -_

Drew pinched his own arm to shut that thought down. It was too early to assume the final perfection would fall into place. "Who are they?" he said instead, in his adult voice, without a note of pleading.

"Let's see." Eric glanced at the pad of paper he and Lauren had taken turns carrying for the past two hours. "We've got James Possible, a senior. Bob Chen, a sophomore. And - well, the first name is smeared, but I know he's Ramesh and he's a junior."

Lauren grinned. "So with a freshman, they'll be a complete set."

 _Now_ nerves were firing in Drew's gut. This sounded so promising, and he wished more than anything he could believe Lauren's grin, framed by her spangly hoop earrings. But if he was the wrong size, the wrong color, the wrong model - the set wouldn't be complete at all.

"Are they. . . are they nice?" he ventured.

Lauren toyed with an earring. "Well, I can't make any promises. But so far, they haven't had any conduct infractions. They never sass the professors or the RAs. And they're very serious students."

It was that last piece of information that had Drew's heart leaping for joy.

 _Possible. Chen. Ramesh._ They didn't _sound_ hateful - then again, neither did "Thompson." Parents probably didn't name their children "Attila the Hun" anymore.

What a shame. If he were going to be evil. . . no, that was ridiculous. If he were going to _pretend_ to be evil - maybe once he'd established himself as a world-famous chemist, he'd be asked to play an evil, potion-carrying wizard at kids' birthday parties - he'd choose a name that was so overtly menacing, people would at least be tipped off that they were supposed to fear him.

Eric interrupted Drew with another dancy-eyed look from under his sportswear hat. (Drew wasn't entirely certain of which sport.) "Let's just say, they're the kinds of guys you'd even let your little sister date," he said.

Drew nodded solemnly. And then un-nodded, just as solemnly. "I don't have a little sister. But I understand," he put in, because Eric was the only guy of equal-or-greater age who hadn't disrespected him with every movement of his lips, and pleasing him was fast moving up Drew's priority list.

Even as he said the words, some strange forces stirred Drew's emotions like chemicals in a flask. He'd always wanted a little sister himself, someone to tickle and tease and take care of. Someone to divert some of Mother's touchy-feely devotion. Someone to admire him, to think he was brave and handsome and brilliant -

It was Lauren who cut him off this time, and this time he was grateful. Besides, it couldn't really be labeled interrupting when they had no way to perceive whether you were finished with a thought or not, right? "And this," she said, "is your room."

Huh? His room? Drew looked around in confusion. His room was at home, in the basement, near the clunking furnace -

Ohhh. His _new_ room. Heh - that'd take some getting used to.

Good thing he'd already had plenty of practice in the art of Sleeping Without Your Baby Blanket.

Eric clicked a key into the lock and turned the knob. The door came open, and Drew gaped like a fish out of water.

The room was large and whitish and looked as if it had been tidied up in a rush. Carpet vacuumed to a slight rubbery odor. Desks set proportionately to the square footage. And there, pressed against the east wall with scientific security, were twin sets of -

Bunk beds! With ladders and everything!

Drew was two skips across the floor before he remembered that was _not_ mature behavior. He turned back to Lauren and Eric and adjusted his glasses in that way that wasn't geeky from one scientist to another. "Can I - I mean - may I?" he began and didn't have the words to finish.

Lauren's motherly face fought off a laugh, he could tell. "You go for it, Drew."

He would have flicked his index finger in response if he hadn't been convinced it would land a film of sweat on her.

Drew crossed the room as slowly as if he were moonwalking, and not in the way Michael Jackson did. Placing one reverent hand in front of the other, he crept his way up the ladder and onto the top bunk.

Soft blue sheets were folded down into square corners. Drew could count every speck in the ceiling plaster, but it didn't loom low enough to set off an attack of claustrophobia. . . that he didn't really have anyway anymore, not really.

And that window! Whoever had designed this room had been a geometrical genius. The window was positioned at the perfect degree to pour sunlight over you in the morning and gradually become your alarm clock, only without the screams that made you bolt up in terror. And College-Designer Einstein had also calculated peak study times to make sure that the light wasn't blasting onto the desks during them.

Ha! He'd like to see Carl and those guys solve _that_ with football helmets and brute force.

Drew flopped onto his belly and stretched in the sunbeam like a drowsy cat, even though his pulse was anything but sleepy. "I always wanted a bed like this! For research purposes," he said quickly, lest they think he might not fit in with his roommates that well after all.

That was the main reason he didn't evaluate the mattress's bounciness. Well, that and the fact that he could have mashed his head right through those plaster tiles that had never looked all that sturdy to him. He just grinned out at the sky and the Magnificent Hill every campus must have been required to have.

Lauren finally urged him down with a wave of her mood ring. Drew kind of hated having to climb backward to the ground, and not because he was clumsy enough to worry that his feet would just flare out from under him. . . .okay, maybe that was _part_ of it. A very teeny-weeny part.

"We've got just enough time to show you your lab," Lauren said.

That did it. Drew hustled to the door behind them and probably would have led the way if he'd had the coordinates to the place. As it was, he jogged to keep up, picking up another beat-per-minute with every fire escape and staircase they passed. He was so excited that the letters on one rally poster twisted out of shape and all around each other.

A smidge of doubt shivered in Drew's chest. Speaking of fish out of water, he was starting to feel like one. Not in the sense that he was about to dry up and die. More like he wasn't sure if he belonged where he was going.

"So did you get my grades?" Drew could only tell the words were his because they rumbled right against his doubt. "Were they good?"

 _Bad Drew! That was a clear violation of Step Four!_

While he was busy mentally handcuffing whatever dumb impulse had decided to say that, Lauren treated him to a return stare. One that didn't appear to be a red pen, ready to mark up his spelling and grammar mistakes, at all.

"Yeah, your grades were fine," Lauren said. "You seem to be a very bright young man."

It wasn't the "Oh my _gosh_ , this kid is a _genius_!" Drew had been waiting for his entire adolescence. But it was a start.

His tour guides steered him down a flight of stairs, through a darkened hallway, and stopped in front of a promising door. A Door, with a capital D.

If it were scientifically possible to have magical portals that transported you into fantasy-lands, Drew would have bet his comic book collection they would have looked just like this one. He was marginally disappointed when Eric unlocked it and sparkles didn't come flying from the keyhole.

Then the Door was opening, and Drew was stepping inside, and the light was thrown on. And everything that hadn't been strapped down got blasted straight out of Drew's mind.

 _This place is utopia!_ he thought in a wonder-struck daze. _No - check that - it's a me-topia! Utopia just for me!_

Not that he wasn't willing to share.

 _This_ room, this marvelous, shiny room, was long and deep enough for hundreds of other college students, and littered with tables, as though it had been eagerly anticipating their arrival. Every shelf and cabinet was royal blue, the walls brushed in a lighter shade. Those must have been the official colors of science. They certainly didn't represent the football team this hallowed institute wouldn't even have _had_.

Textbooks were stacked like Lincoln Logs on some of the tables. Flat, newfangled chips of circuitry lay on a few others. And still others - Drew felt his nostrils quiver with every heated breath -

Still others were decorated with test tubes - beakers - vials - even ones connected with those squiggly little tunnels! In the bright lights glinting off their surfaces, Drew almost got the illogical notion that these inanimate objects were winking at him.

 _Must. . . get. . . closer. . ._

Even though Drew's heels were kicking and springing, his walk seemed stronger and surer than when he was approaching the bunk bed. The tiles, with soot-stained patches that ushered him across, didn't stumble beneath the low traction of his dress shoes.

Forget fish out of water. They belonged together. He and this lab, they were soul-mates.

Well, at least _sole_ -mates.

The instructions that popped into Drew's brain were rapid-fire and translated in pictures, without any words to trip over. "Goggles!" he cried. "We'll need safety goggles first thing, of course. And some protective gloves - let's see, in high school, they were usually under the sink. . . "

Yup. Here too. Drew tugged on a pair of gloves seven sizes too big for him and snapped the equally-big goggles down over his eyes. Everything in the room was magnified, bulging at him. "Get out everything you need for the experiment before you begin," he continued, zipping back to the table. "Never breathe any chemical too deeply. Always trust the meniscus over the majority, even if you have to crouch down and squint to see it! And keep a fire extinguisher ready at all times!"

Lauren's jaw fell. In a good way.

Hmm. _Drop a girl's jaw in a good way._ That was a goal he'd come thiiiiiiis close to giving up on.

It was so overwhelmingly good that it broke him out into song as instantly as poison ivy broke him out into a rash. "Hydrogen, helium, lithium," Drew sang to a rhythm he invented as he went along. "Now it's time to split the atom."

Eric's toned neck vibrated with a chuckle. "This dude's a natural!"

 _Dude_. Not _kid_. _Dude_.

"Are you happy, Drew?" Lauren said.

Drew scanned his databanks for a way to communicate, _That is the stupidest question you could possibly ask,_ without actually saying, _That is the stupidest question you could possibly ask_. Spit out the first one he hit upon - "Is the Pope Jewish?"

The jaw that had dropped earlier was now clamping to hold back laughter. Drew appreciated the attempt, but it didn't soothe how stupid he felt when she said, "Um, no."

Of course. Catholic. The word was _Catholic_. He thought he remembered hearing that he had both somewhere in his ancestry - but that kind of thing didn't get passed down, at least not through the genes.

He might have just come apart right there, if it wasn't for exactly where "there" was.

 _This is precisely why you're a science major._

Drew pressed one gloved fingertip to a vial. The belonging held him there even while pure raw energy burned in his legs. "And when you're done, extinguish all open flames, seal all test tubes, and wipe up any spills - before you run down the hall and announce you've changed the course of science!" He beamed at them, since they seemed to enjoy that. "I have trouble remembering that part."

Eric smiled without snickering. Lauren didn't reach down and ruffle his hair the way Drew had kinda expected her to.

Only one word fluttered into his mind - one he'd first seen on the cover of one of Julie's fairy-tale books and had to look up:

 _Haven._

Right here in this building, Drew felt the potential coursing through him. The chance to make a name for himself. To prove his genius to the world and maybe help cure cancer or something while he was at it. The chance to escape from Carl Thompson and his band of creeps, who had even this afternoon walked up and pinched his arm and said, "I don't feel any muscles yet, Drewbie."

He didn't _see_ any, either, not when he glanced out the window and caught his reflection in the pane. Drew Lipsky was still a Popsicle stick of a person who could fry onion rings off his oily skin.

But for the first time, Drew knew what he looked like with his shoulders squared.

"Well, Drew, I think our time's just about up." Lauren tapped her watch with a white-tipped nail. "It's been fun. Can't wait to have you here."

 _Can't wait to_ be _here_ , Drew thought with a squirm. He was finally being treated like the studious almost-adult he was, and he wasn't eager to go back to Mother's cheek-pinching and babying. With reluctant hands, he removed his goggles and gloves and arranged them in a neat pile next to his beloved beakers.

"Before you go, do you have any questions? Any concerns?" Lauren asked. She and Eric started for the door, and Drew dragged himself after them.

He was about to shake his head - _no, and I want to keep it that way_ \- when they walked by the textbook table. In thick black type, the green cover yelled, _Cehmistyr 101_.

Drew's stomach tightened into a knot of twine (twine being much more poetic than "intestines"). That was supposed to say _Chemistry 101_ , and maybe it did - to everyone but him. His neurons were scrambling at top speed, and they had no patience to sort out all those letters.

And now that hung over his head like a hatchet, waiting to drop.

He wanted to ask if that was normal. He wanted to be reassured that it was. He wanted to open up to Lauren, whose bright red lipstick was pursing sympathetically at him. If they'd already decided he was a "bright young man," that wouldn't change - would it?

Would it?

 _Wouldn't_ it? It was something Lauren and Eric had been unaware of when they'd accepted him. And now they'd already been exposed to his Pope-related ignorance.

Too late to kick him out; he'd earned the scholarship - but wouldn't there always be an asterisk in their minds next to the name _Drew Lipsky_? And a footnote saying, "Smart enough in science, but he can barely read when he gets worked up, so there must be _something_ wrong with him"?

That would be a very long and unwieldy footnote.

"Drew?" Lauren wrinkled her made-up brow at him. "Any concerns?"

Fake it. He could fake it. Almost every science word was so important to Drew that he'd memorized its distortions, recognized them for what they were written to be. It was when they started reading from Shakespeare or Steinbeck that the trouble started - only when would _that_ ever come up in chemistry class?

"Drew?"

Drew startled a look up at her and felt his Adam's apple jerk to the side. "No," he said. "No concerns."

And he squeezed it all back down.

Drew was off the bus, across the street, and onto the sidewalk before the doors even sighed shut behind him. Well, not really _sighed_. More like quacked, which didn't have the same flow to it. It filled his head with thoughts of ducks - but then, there were worse subjects to think about.

Like the Black Death of medieval fame. Or hefty football warrior bullies looming over you.

Or the swamp his armpits had become. It kept sparking in Drew's brain like an incomplete circuit - _should_ he have told Eric and Lauren about words turning his intellect slushy? Maybe they could have helped him -

Except, when had anybody _ever_ helped him?

Drew did his best nonchalant amble down the sidewalk, not even bothering to vault the cracks for dramatic purposes. That would have been childish and superstitious, two qualities never found in a professional scientist. Mixed-up in the noggin was bad enough.

On the one hand, he couldn't wait to leave and go off to college. He felt like a fish who'd _born_ out of water, flopping on the scalding sand for seventeen years, who'd finally struggled his way to a tide pool. And the instant the water lapped over him, his scorched scales were revived, his fins began to work, and he wasn't the mutant freak he'd been above sea level.

It wasn't a perfect description - any fish would be dead after seventeen years on shore, for one thing - but Drew was proud of it anyway.

He stopped at the edge of his driveway and looked up at the tired little muddy-brown house, kept from being a shack only by his mother's continual care, and sighed heavily. That was the other part of it - the other hand, as the saying went. It was the only home Drew had ever known, even if it always leaned sideways and had doors that didn't fit in bad weather and still smelled like moss from the spring rain. An interesting, scientific smell, but then so was nail polish, and you weren't supposed to get too big a whiff of that either.

Mother always wore hers strawberry-red. Her nail polish, that is, not her moss -

 _Mother._

Drew swallowed around a hitching lump. She was the one who gave both hands equal ammunition.

She didn't understand all of his problems - partially because Drew never shared the bits that would worry her too much - but Mother always knew just how to comfort him. She would give him a kiss on the forehead that he automatically forgave because of the accompanying cookie, and she would tell him what a good boy he was, and he would be snug in her love. Who would do that for him in college?

The narrow row of grass that passed as their front yard suddenly seemed like a nice Pondering Place, and Drew rushed over, crouching above-ground so he wouldn't stain his dress pants. No, this issue didn't just have one hand and the other hand. It was many-many-many-handed. Sort of like an octopus.

Well, octopi didn't really have hands, not in the truest sense of the word. . .

Whatever. Unless he got some very domestically-inclined roommates, Drew wouldn't be awakening in his dorm to steam condensing on a bowl of oatmeal at his place and a fresh set of clothes laid (or was it _lain_?) across his chair. Not that he was too lazy or too incompetent to do it himself - Drew squashed the thought as if it were a roach.

There was just something so. . . so secure about your mother whipping it up with her special touch while you slept.

And all right, if he were completely honest - that security could tempt him into staying forever. You could only dwell in in your childhood basement for so long after graduation, though, before people started whispering words like "maladjusted" (or "Mama's boy," if they weren't intelligent enough to know psychological terms).

Besides, it would have been selfish to mooch off Mother's generosity forever. She needed Drew's help - more than that, she _deserved_ his help. Mothers took care of their little boys, and then the little boys grew up to take care of their mothers. It was the natural cycle of things, and he would be honored to take his new place in it.

Just maybe not immediately.

Drew rubbed at the lenses he'd only now noticed were smeared. _Still, at college you shall_ ("shall" was so much fancier than "will") _have friends. Maybe. Possibly. Imagine that - your own little band of friends! You might even be able to share your problems with them._

 _That_ would be a relief. There was so much stuff he'd never spoken of stuffed inside Drew it could burst and leak the way the blisters did when you poked at them too hard.

After all, they were the kinds of guys he could even trust with the little sister he'd never had. Not like Carl, who seemed to think girls were made to hang on him like medallions. How could they be mean?

 _Possible, Chen, Ramesh, and Lipsky_. Now _there_ was a sequence that flowed!

Drew cocked his fist to knock on the front door. Then he stopped, foot frozen in mid-descent above the porch that had done battle with its fair share of termites. Then nestled his elbows into a cross-armed hold.

Did he really want to go inside, where his mother would call him "Drewbie" and "Baby" even though he was a head and a half taller than her, and his good mood would squander into upset? Where she'd greet him with the inevitable cheek-pinch, too, and he'd have no choice but to squall, "Moth-ER!" and lose every last drop of maturity? Every time, his voice chopped in two, and the pieces raced each other to the heights.

 _No._ Drew backed away, powdery puffs of dirt crunching under his heels. _No, I don't._

The next swallow, he could feel his larynx and his epiglottis instead of a huge (and possibly cancerous) bulge of longing. With his throat strong and capable, Drew slowly rotated his body and turned his back on the door, eyes closed so he couldn't watch his childhood disintegrate.

It took all his might, which was why Drew was so surprised to be caught by a huge gust of more when his lids opened again to take in the neighborhood. The view was the same, despite the fact that nothing would ever be the same again, including the new, adult vision he was using to pan his surroundings.

Okay, that might have had something to do with cleaning his glasses.

The welling of strength, though - that was new. Entirely. Drew hadn't known maturity could come over you that fast and iron out your backbone in the process. And yet here he was, standing perfectly vertical and abruptly mature.

Not student-mature. Warrior-mature. Like someone desperately needed help, and he was smart enough - maybe even strong enough - to provide it.

Yes, bring on the obstacles! He could climb every mountain, ford every river, domesticate every wild beast! Even clean his room.

For the moment, Drew Lipsky could do anything.

He gave the neighborhood a quick scan to see if any of the good citizens of Middleton happen to need assistance. If he were Superman, there would be some little old lady who'd passed out on her driveway for him to do CPR on.

Nothing.

Well, he was no Superman anyway. He still had the pipsqueak chest and the ribs that stacked as if they were sticks waiting to be thrown in a fire, and his chances of growing into himself were as slim as his shoulder span continued to be. And he'd never done CPR before, except on the dummy in health class.

Drew's drooping gaze landed on a - a - a _something_ in the center of the road. It was flat on the edges and kind of humped in the middle, like a hubcap. Had Eddy been dissecting his dad's tires again?

As if cars were summoned at the thought of Eddy's name, a pickup revved a wide path down the street, barely rocking the whatever-it-was between its tires instead of under the front left one before disappearing around the corner with a screech.

Drew cringed, wondering how this guy had gotten his license and then double-cringing at the memories of Driver's Ed. At least there was nothing in the "bed" of his pickup (which appeared to be one of the _least_ comfortable places to sleep in the whole world) to go flying out.

Meanwhile, the hubcap began to inch closer to the driveway. Drew blinked six full blinks, but the movement didn't stop.

Science said it couldn't be so. Either he'd wandered onto the set of _Night of the Living Car Parts_ \- rated R for graphic engine failure - or. . .

. . . or that was not a hubcap.

"No! Of course not!" Drew was on his feet in a millisecond. "A turtle!"

It wasn't exactly the type of rescue that got you on the front page. Even the tiny _Middleton Weekly_ wasn't that desperate.

But it was a fellow creature. And it was in need.

What else was a guy without a little sister supposed to do?

He looked both ways - because Mother didn't raise no fool - tore out into the street and looked down at the turtle, with its little legs churning as quickly as they could and what Drew could swear was fear in its beady eyes. When he scooped it up in his palm, it retreated back into its shell, much the way Drew himself had often wished he could retract himself into his baggy hand-me-downs.

The fate of this creature was entirely up to Drew. He wasn't such a pipsqueak anymore, not in comparison. It was a prospect that had him puffing up and straightening everything he could puff up and straighten.

"What happened to yielding for slower pedestrians?" Drew hollered at the car that wasn't there anymore, shaking a fist after it. It did absolutely no good except to poke air holes in his stored-up anger before it boiled over.

The shell was sturdy and smooth in Drew's hand, the texture fascinating. He cradled it to his shirt and gave in to the desire to stroke it, the way he would have when he was a child. Twenty minutes ago.

"It'll be all right, little guy," Drew said - in a tone he'd never heard himself use before, almost a coo. "You're out of the road. I'll put you in a spot where there's some nice. . . err . . .grass to eat. You like grass, right?"

No response, as expected.

"Well, when I'm a world-famous chemist, I'll have some clout. And I'll make sure no one will ever run you fellas over again." It was sensational to finally say it aloud, even if it were just to a turtle.

At the end of the block was a vacant lot with grass and clover and other assorted plant-type things sprouting all over it as though to make up for the lack of lawns. Drew tucked the turtle into a patch of weeds at the spot most mathematically distant from the street and patted the shell one last time. "There you go."

The turtle poked its nose out. Drew decided that meant "Thank you" in Turtle.

He rubbed his stomach. Wow, this adult thing really worked up an appetite! And he knew Mother would have something simply scrumptious at home.

Drew turned and walked back toward his own house without any dread to drag his feet. Because independence would be his for the rest of his life, but this kind of support would only last a few more months. And if independence meant no more home-cooked meals, Drew planned to savor every one of the however-many he had left.

 _Which would be - let's see - breakfast and dinner for the last couple weeks of school. So that's two a day for three weeks, plus three a day for three months -_

Of course, there were many variables involved. Whether or not they splurged and went out to eat to celebrate his graduation. Whether anyone in Mother's bridge club invited them over for dinner. And did leftovers count as one meal or two?

The odds were happily adding themselves up in Drew's brain as he hopped-skipped-jumped onto the porch and almost went through the floorboards. He'd found where he belonged. . . and for once in his life, he'd been able to protect a being other than himself.

He wanted more of that.

Forty-five miles away, in a delivery room inside Go City General Hospital, a doctor held up a wet little bundle with a mop of dark hair and said, "It's a girl."

 **~Note: I really wanted to show how sweet little Drew transforms into his demented alter ego without him coming across as a junior villain. What I tried to get across is how much this "fresh start" means to him, and now utterly devastated he was when it went wrong, too. The kid is coming unglued, and he couldn't hold all the hurt back too much longer. . .**

 **Anyway, enough psychological analysis. Hope you enjoyed - and with any luck my chapters should be shorter and update more frequent. Yay, right? ;) ~**


	2. Craving

**~My next ficcie! Huge thanks to everyone who reviewed the first one, including guest reviewer Buba.**

 **2\. Craving**

The printing press was the best thing before sliced bread. Reforming is the best thing since.

Dr. Drakken lovingly caresses the lip of a Bunsen burner with his thumb as his eyes wander over his beloved Lab 591. The sight of the curvy walls, the sound of the fizzing beakers, the refreshing chemical odor are to their respective senses what cotton candy is to his taste - sweet and light and lovely.

Even after so many years, it's sometimes hard for Drakken to believe he's the owner of this new life, where joy is the rule and not the exception. Where he's no longer a control group as God experimentally gives people stuff to find out what makes them happiest. Dr. Director's face, usually so solemn and stern, never fails to turn florescent when he clocks in for work at nine A.M. sharp. Kim Possible says that only happens if she really, _really_ likes you - and Kim Possible, of all people, would know.

The _lack_ of certain other things cement it. No one watching him from suspicious slits anymore. No one giving him wary looks that say, _I'm sure I'm going to be your next victim,_ while their neighbor's curled lip telegraphs, _If you could ever successfully victimize someone, that is._

And right now, he and his fellow scientists are hard at work on a chemical spray that will transform blasts from deadly weapons into rainbow stuns and reverse the trajectory. (The rainbows were Drakken's idea.) Just one of the many, many miracles of science Drakken takes such pride in being permitted to help along its way.

He's reaching for a vial of purple sparkly stuff whose name he's too excited to remember when a bell tolls from afar.

All right, so it's right next to him, and it's his cell phone - but can't a mad scientist wax dramatic every now and then?

Whatever and wherever it is, Drakken jumps a kilometer or two. (The metric system is much more scientific.) He tends to forget cell phones' existence when he's wrapped up in Experiment-Land. Doesn't even use the calculator on there much - he's a little ADHD and will almost certainly be distracted by Facebook or Sudoku or what have you.

Once he climbs down, calms down, Drakken reaches for his phone, flowers tightening around his sinew. Who's trying to contact him? _Oooh boy, if this is some sort of spammy scam about tax returns, somebody is going to -_

 _\- going to receive a very strongly worded e-mail,_ Drakken redirects himself quickly. He's gotten better and better about catching those thoughts before they can reproduce like bunnies. Bunnies that could get him thrown back in prison.

Those aren't a good breed of bunnies.

But one look down at his screen, and everything mad dissolves in the world's fastest case of corrosion. Drakken's mood, in fact, leaps so high only NASA themselves would be able to bring it back into the atmosphere (which even they couldn't, not really, since moods aren't physical things that can be grabbed and moved).

It's Shego! He heard from Shego! The yin to his yang, the salt to his pepper, the. . . Chip to his. . . Dale?

He's running out of comparisons, so Drakken decides to go ahead and read the message already.

It says, **Come on over after work, Dr. D. I got some news for you.**

Drakken stares. He can't read Shego right now, and this time it's not due to the vexations of having dyslexia. More the fact that she states everything so matter-of-factly, without the use of exclamation points and smileys or emoticons or however the teens today refer to those punctuation faces. She could win the lottery or - or - have something really bad happen to her (that's a harder example to think up, since Drakken can't quite recall anything really bad ever happening to Shego), and none of it would make a dent in her flat sarcasm.

 **What news?** Drakken texts back, left-handed, right fist pressed to his chest to tame the worry.

Shego's reply? **Not the kind you can tell over text.**

Hmmm. Drakken taps his phone against his shelf of chin. What are you not allowed to say over texts? He makes an effort to keep up with the latest laws, so he doesn't break one by mistake, but has to admit he never knew there were legalities involved in texting.

Maybe it's something really embarrassing, like - no, wait, that only happens to boys. . . Nuh-uh, that too. And that. . .

Besides, he's only seen Shego embarrassed a few (very few) times. One of them was on the worst night of his life.

 _Or something that's illegal in the first place. . ._

Drakken sits down hard in his chair. His heart is racing out of control, and the beat echoes in his stomach. Does this - does this mean Shego is going back to evil?

If it does - if Shego's evil and he's good - that'll place them on opposite sides! They'll have to _fight_ each other! And while Drakken is accustomed to his and Shego's little skirmishes, he has no desire to battle her for real.

Or to send her back to prison. Or to lose his best friend.

What the heck kind of stupid person _would_ have that desire?

 _No, no, no!_ Drakken shoves his hands through his hair-spikes, disheveling them into a frantic, even-spikier state. _That can_ not _be the case!_

After all, Shego's settled down now. Married. Works with that computer-tech kid snagging the corporate villains who jump through loopholes (so she can still fight, but for justice now). Content.

Or so Drakken thought.

He chews on that more than lunch at the noon break. Whatever he's eating has the flavor of cotton - which Drakken actually has tasted, once, when he got scared enough to gnaw his own sweater. For him, to not enjoy a meal is to have certain doom hanging over your head.

(Drakken checks just to be sure. It's just the ceiling.)

Just as in elementary school, lunch hour also comes with what basically amounts to recess. One of the few things Global Justice _doesn't_ have, however, is a playground. That's usually not a bother for Drakken - life in the laboratory is the ultimate escape, in and of itself.

Today, though, he needs to bounce off wiggly bridges. To whoosh down slides. To pump his legs toward the sky as he swings.

For things that don't have a set formula or equation, Drakken has found movement to be the best solution.

Perhaps he ought to go see Dr. Director. She can always extract his fear and safely dispose of it before it gets contaminated and becomes hysteria. Drakken takes off down the hall toward her office, but the sign on the door declares her to be IN A CONFERENCE, and he dares not barge in on _that_. It would be a really good way to never get sparkled at again.

Drakken turns and reluctantly heads back to Lab 591 - the first time in recorded history (at least that he can remember) that he has to force his feet _toward_ a lab. What he's much more familiar with is the preoccupation filling his brain and making him sloppy. And since he has a rather haphazard style of genius to begin with, he certainly can't afford any more sloppiness.

Exhibit A: He leaves an open flame unattended. Well, technically, Drakken was right there, looking straight at it, but only seeing Shego on the lam (which was a streetwise term for running from authorities, even though it sounded like she was riding a sheep). Drakken noticed not _too_ long after the fire reached out from under the burner, and one of his vines captured the fire extinguisher, and he sprayed it right out, bellowing, "DIE, FOUL FLAME!"

Which at least earned him some chuckles. Not the mean variety, either.

Exhibit B: He stumbles smack into an important-looking tray in the hall. Well, it's not _it_ giving off the air of importance as much as the complex night goggles that Drakken has heard tell can do more than a Swiss army knife. One pair rattles from the tray and plummets to the floor.

Drakken scrambles to catch it, but his arms just won't move. Fortunately, his vines have much quicker reflexes. He congratulates his loyal purple flower and places the goggles back on the tray, glancing over both shoulders to verify there are no witnesses.

Exhibit C: He wanders into the women's restroom by mistake. Walks in on Dr. Rutherford as she's washing her hands. They both scream for two minutes straight.

Drakken's longings for his evil tools are few and far between anymore. At this point, though, he really wouldn't object to having a mind wipe.

True friends or not, he's sure everyone is glad to be rid of him by the end of the day. Drakken wishes he could be rid of _himself_. Just dump himself by the side of the road until he pulls himself back together and can come back for himself.

See, his thoughts are starting to make less and less sense.

Drakken flies the hovercraft to Shego's place on the nice side of Middleton. Her house stands square and proud and has obviously not burnt to the ground. Well, that's one horror he can check off his list.

And if he just goes in and talks to Shego, he can be rid of the others. Yet Drakken's legs lock down beneath the dashboard and simply refuse to pry loose. His wrists shake on the steering gears. His tongue molds to the roof of his mouth.

Because. . . what if he _can't_ be rid of the others? What if one of them is _true_ , and Shego confirms it? Drakken's in no rush to hear _that_.

 _Please be all right, Shego._

Drakken plays with his belt and his fingertips and his key ring until the sun gets bored with him and ducks behind the horizon. Night breathes on his neck, bringing with it the icy scenarios of Shego returning to crime, expecting him to come with her. . . which he can't. He can never go back to that life, all guilt and frustration, but how could he get up in the morning and tie his shoes when he wears the ones with the laces and pack his lunch - without Shego three blocks away?

Finally - and there must be some sort of time warp involved, because the clock says it's only been twenty minutes - Drakken hauls his quivery body from the hovercraft and starts up the sidewalk for Shego's front door. He wishes he could say it's because he's gained some courage, but mostly it's just getting dark and cold, and he wants to be inside.

His stomach is a Petri dish of rapidly multiplying worries by the time he reaches her house. Drakken attempts to clip briskly across the driveway, but his knee joints are stiff, as if he's approaching a courtroom. He's never entered a courtroom _once_ and had it end well. Not once.

 _Pleasepleasepleasepleaseplease. . ._

Drakken's fingertips tap again. Then one unfolds and pokes the doorbell.

 _Di-i-i-i-i-ng do-o-o-o-o-ng._

Even its chime seems to be trembling. (That or his eardrums.)

Shego opens the door, lips in mid-twitch, as though she's already predicted his end of the conversation and found it most amusing. She's the closest thing to a psychic there can be within the bounds of science.

"Come on in," she says.

Drakken does. Even here, this close, he can't read her. He's never been able to duplicate her skill for that - Drakken knows his fear is currently etched onto his body like a tattoo.

Shego takes a seat on her squishy-comfy couch. Drakken, on the other hand, can't sit. He hugs a pillow to his torso. Tosses it aside. And begins to pace the floor.

"First off, Shego, I have a moral responsibility to ask - are you turning evil again?"

 _Please, no, please no, pleaseno._

The twitching speeds up. "Uh, no," Shego says. "And what would you have a 'moral responsibility' to do if I said yes?"

"Crawl under my bed and cry," he confesses.

Shego spits out a giggle. "I can always count on you for honest, Doc."

He wasn't going for that. Things just come out so _easily_ around Shego.

Especially now. Maybe it's the amber light in her living room - the green points of her face seem softer somehow. With her distinctive outfit and her signature waves of hair, she's obviously the girl who showed up on his porch years and years ago looking for work, yet in the absence of the preparation-to-pounce, she looks like a whole other person.

"As a matter of fact," Shego says, "this pretty much guarantees that I can never go back to evil again."

Ooh. _Ooh_! That has to be a good thing, right?

Doesn't it? The still green eyes that gaze back at him don't _look_ like there's been a seismic disruption, but he gets nervous anyway. Well, nervouser. Well, if that's even a word.

"So, I went to the doctor today -" Shego says.

"Do you have cancer?" he busts in. Yes, he's aware that interrupting is impolite, but his anxieties are compounding. With interest.

"No, no, no, no," Shego says, the calm-down-Drakken voice activated. "This is _good_ news."

Drakken perks up, his ponytail light enough to spring again. "You're immortal?" he says. Even Spider-Man can't compete with _that_!

Her flat eyes roll. "No-o-o."

Humph. Factoring in Shego's amazing powers and the physical feats she pulls off every single day, Drakken didn't think it was _that_ far-fetched.

Well, whatever. Drakken sinks to a half-squat above the sofa to ponder this, thumb tapping against his teeth. The _doctor_. What type of good news would you get from a doctor, besides the assurance that you're healthy? Which is great - nothing to throw a party over, though. . .

"You really can't guess?"

Shego's disbelief hangs on the edge of laughter, and Drakken is not appreciative. "No," he admits.

"You are so _male_."

What is _that_ supposed to mean?

He's about to ask, actually, when Shego peers up at him and smiles the most tender smile he may have ever seen on her. "I'm gonna have a baby, Dr. D," she says, pitching the sentence softly at him.

 _A what a who a why?_

Drakken is struck speechless - not a rare occurrence - and noiseless - now, _that_ 's unusual. He's left only with a _This page could not be displayed_ screen, the kind the wi-fi gives you when the power goes out. He gulps and gasps and blushes and even though it's not the world-collapsing news he was fearing, his blood rushes in his ears as though he's about to faint.

"A ba - a - baby?" Drakken says, at long last, after a pause that's apparently not the only expectant thing in the room. "You mean, like an infant?"

Shego throws him a smirk. "No, I mean like a tadpole."

Okay, see, now she's just teasing. He's about to yell that at her, except he's not sure if the little boy or girl inside her will hear. Drakken's forgotten at exactly what week the ears begin to function, and his angry retorts shouldn't be the first thing to travel down those little canals.

Drakken whooshes out air, studies Shego, who's as loose and limber and lean (and all those other "l" words) as ever. "You don't look -" he starts to say, but _pregnant_ crumbles before one syllable can exit.

"Uh, hello? Do you need to reread your manual on embryonic development?" Shego raps her knuckles against his temple. "I have a couple more months before I start looking like a hippo."

What? Hip - ohhhh. (That's funny. _Hipp-ohhhh._ )

She's not talking species change. She's talking weight gain. The former he could argue; the latter not so much. "A really pretty hippo," is all he can say, from the depths of the honesty Drakken's now apparently notorious for.

Shego's smirk splits in half. "Charmer," she says. "You might take that back once my ankles swell up and I get morning sickness and stretch marks."

Drakken cringes. He's experienced ankle troubles and tummy troubles himself - not from pregnancy, of course, but bad enough. Bad enough not to wish them on her. It wallops him in the ankles _and_ the tummy that this is something he can't protect her from.

"So. . . why are you doing this?" he asks.

Shego snorts right out loud. "I don't know."

Not words you hear from her. Ever.

She appears to transform into the little girl he never got the chance to meet right there in front of him, and Drakken can't imagine her lugging around a baby inside. Bellies that big are torturous when you're that small. Drakken's done some unintended research (mostly at Thanksgiving).

And yet Shego's standing there, arms folded across the front of her jumpsuit, hair pulled back with a headband, and eyes sparkling in a fashion Drakken's never seen them do before. Sort of the way they would gleam in the past when she got the chance to fight, only it's. . . somehow pure at present.

Delighted tingles creep across Drakken's skin, and he feels his face soften like butter. "You're going to be a mommy, Shego," he breathes. The whole situation, from the carpet below him to the darkening sky out the window, has an unreal quality to it, like Shego's starring in a movie and he's just there to watch.

"I know." Twitch. "Scary thought, isn't it?"

No, that's not at _all_ what he was implying! Thoughts snarl over themselves in Drakken's brain. Only the one clear space up there, his own personal oasis, feeds him his next line:

"I don't know. You always took good care of me."

It comes alive for him - her tucking him in bed and bringing him orange juice for his failed immune system. Her driving him to the ER because he cut his face with his own blade or exploded a Doomsday device in his own face or smacked into a train tunnel hard enough to give it an imprint and himself a concussion. Her cracking him when his back gave out on him in mid-scheme.

And always the words: _Chill out, Dr. D. Stop crying. You'll be fine._

The memories are to be speaking to Shego, too, Drakken can tell. She eyes him with the faint trace of a twinkle that's almost identical to Dr. Director's.

Drakken's uncertain exactly which detail brings him back to reality - the sandpaper texture of his throat, all the way down; the sharp - ow! - pinch he gives his wrist; or the flowers wordlessly screaming congratulations in his head. Whichever the case, it's happening, and it's affecting him, too, and he reels backward over the ottoman.

"And I'll be a - I'll be a - " Drakken peers up at Shego, not trusting his feet to push him vertical again. "What will I be?"

"What do you _want_ to be?" Shego's voice is as smooth and comfortable as the arms hanging at her sides, and it has that I-trust-you note to it again.

His chest glows cozy. Self-confidence he never experienced until age forty-two - still a surprising resident in there. She has given him a job, and it needs to be completed in the Best Possible Fashion.

Let's see. He's obviously not the father, and despite the creaks in his joints as he rises, Drakken doesn't feel old enough to be a grandfather. There's godfathers and gobstoppers and a cat named Kalamazoo -

Yup. Still nervous.

Drakken thumbs a round cheek, almost as pale as Shego's - maybe paler now, considering her calm and his surprise. He remembers his recent outings with Team Go, hears that creep Aviarius cawing, "What in the name of all things feathered? There's ANOTHER brother?"

He can't recall if they ever saw any reason to correct him.

"An uncle," Drakken says, rubbing the back of his neck. "Can I - can I be an uncle?"

"Uncle Drakken. I kinda like the sound of that." Shego's lips don't twitch at him now. They tweak. It's warmer.

He doesn't need a flower's help this time. Drakken goes to Shego and wraps her up in a hug, keeping a precise reign on his clumsy limbs. He will not let them slip, will not let them carelessly bump his new niece or nephew. The one who isn't capable of being tough yet, even with Shego's genes.

Shego lets Drakken hold both of them for an entire forty-six seconds. A record broken only by her wedding day.

So much love.

 **()()()()()()**

King Triton, ruler of the Seven Seas, is extending his trident to pass sentence on the sea witch when his phone rings.

For a minute, he's baffled. Phones, whether cellular or pluggy-in, are electronics, and thus should not function in water. Then again, he himself is a merman, a creature that defies science, so maybe an underwater phone isn't so strange after all.

He flings out an arm. Lands on a square something he reels back in the way those land-dwellers do with their ghastly fishing lines. Says, "Hello, this is Atlantica, King Triton speaking," and startles at his own voice. It rasps and hacks, more duck than king.

"Oh, darn," says the person on the other end. It has to be a kitty who's not happy about getting her shots. Some vet's about to get a slice carved down his face. "I was trying for Dr. Drakken."

Grog. He's heard that name before.

 _Hold the phone!_ he commands himself, even though he's _already_ holding it. _That's. . . me!_

Yes, he is Dr. Drakken, cradled comfortably in his enormous red bed. That would make the King Triton thing a mere dream. While he's given up the tyrannical idea of world conquest, sometimes he pretends to be a rightful king and it skips into his dreams every now and then.

It would also make the cat on the phone. . .

"Shego!" Drakken squints at his alarm clock. "Shego, what are you _doing_? It's 4:12 in the morning!"

Shego's snort is so full and juicy and alive, Drakken doubts she needs sleep at all. "Oh, right. Like how many times have _you_ called _me_ in the middle of the night?"

Ah. She raises a valid point. Let's see, there was the time right after she first took the job, then that incident with the peanut butter, then. . .

Drakken loses count after twenty-eight and Shego loses patience, so they agree to leave it rhetorical.

Things come back to Drakken as he's prying crust from his eyes, however. Shego's five-and-a-half months _pregnant_ \- a word he can now filter through his mental sieve without it jamming and blotching him up. Her husband's away on a business trip all week. Drakken's told her to call if she needs anything. . .

He bolts upright. Ish. One foot drags the bedsheet with it and pins it to the floor.

"Shego!" Drakken squeaks, reminding himself less of Donald Duck and more of Mickey Mouse. "Are you in trouble? Is it the baby? Do you need to go to the hospital?!"

"Dr. D! Chill! Geez, you're worse than a parent." Shego's chuckling, probably not a sound she would be making if she were going into premature labor. "Yeah, it's the baby, but it's nothing serious. Just a craving."

"A craving?" It sounds pretty serious to Drakken. He's lived through those belly-growls for one specific thing, picky right down to the atomic structure of a certain brand.

"Yeah. You crave weird foods in the middle of the night when you're pregnant."

Freeze. "Uh-oh."

It doesn't take Drakken's scientific genius long to remember that's not how it works. Granted, Shego's abrupt laughter shaking over the line probably helps some. "Well, _you_ don't. But women do."

Drakken plows a hand back through his bed-head. "So. . . what are you, err, craving?"

"Pickles."

Drakken blinks. It's so very strange. With the only light coming from the spongy numbers on his clock, the room is in such total darkness that he can't easily discern when his eyes are open and when they're closed. Also, he's never seen Shego eat a pickle before, ever.

Cucumbers, yes. Pickles, no.

"Is this a prank?" he asks.

"Uh, no." Shego's frowning - he can tell even over the phone. "I'm not _that_ mean."

Right. She's not. Not anymore.

That's a positive thought, an energizing one. "I might have some in my refrigerator!" Drakken says. "Let me go check!" He likes himself a good peanut-butter-and-pickle sandwich, which Shego labels "icky" only because her palette doesn't appreciate salty and sour together.

When Drakken stands up, it takes him several steps to realize two or three of his toes are still mummified in the sheet. He can't untangle them in time, and events move into fast-forward. Events which result in him knotted on the ground in pain.

"Ow," he says.

"Dr. D? What was that?"

"Everything's fine, Shego," Drakken assures her as he unwraps his accidental tourniquet (which aren't even the best first-aid tactic anymore, according to _Reader's Digest_ ) and concentrates on being grateful that he didn't knock the mattress askew while he was at it. "I just dropped a. . . a . . ."

His mind hasn't fully rebooted yet, and he can't conjure a story to lessen the blush factor. ". . . a me," he finishes lamely.

"My hero."

The words are wry, but Drakken privately glows that they weren't spewed as if there were no truth to them whatsoever.

Hates being woken up in the middle of the night. Loves being a hero - has the medal to prove it.

Once Drakken reaches the kitchen - _gaaah_ , the light! Too bright! His corneas! Half-blinded, he switches it off. The teeny bulb in the top of the refrigerator is all that's necessary to grope through its shelves.

He finds cheese, lettuce, butter, and many other things. (Oh, so _that_ 's where all the leftover Halloween candy got to!) He also finds a great lack of pickles.

"Drat!" Drakken hisses.

"Oooh. You kiss your mama with that mouth?" Shego's own mouth is doing an almost-audible dance on the other end.

Drakken blinks again, dull yellow flecks behind his eyelids. "It's the only one I've got. . . Shego, guffawing like that cannot be good for the baby!"

Balancing the phone between his ear and shoulder, Drakken cricks his neck sideways to talk into the mouthpiece. Wherever it is on these fancy newfangled cell phones. "Status Report," he announces. "We have no pickles. I shall search for cucumbers on which to begin the Pickling Process!"

"Yeah, orrr - " The playful edge of a taunt tickles at Shego's voice and stops his hand halfway to the crisper - "it might be a little easier to just go buy a jar."

 _Now_ Drakken can feel the blotches. "Um. Blajh. Yes." He coughs. "That would have been Plan B."

Quick glance at the oven clock, and his posture devolves. Drakken slumps like Quasidormo - Quasiscience - Quasi - that poor old hunchback from the days before reconstructive surgery.

"Did I mention it's 4:12 in the morning?" he says. "4:20 now? Even Smarty Mart will be closed at this hour!"

"The gas stations aren't."

Ah, yes. Gas stations. "Convenience stores" to the sophisticated, likely because it's convenient that they're open at 4:20 in the morning. Well, as convenient as pre-sunrise pickle runs can get.

And then Shego says it: "Please, Dr. D?" Drakken envisions the narrowed eyes broadening slightly at their almond corners.

He catches a gasp, shoves it back down his throat. He's never heard Shego use the word "please" before, except for on those smart-alecky occasions when she'd drill him with a glare like one of Eddy's power tools and say, "Please spare me," or something similar. It's exponentially odder than blinking in the dark.

Shego has requested his assistance. That's something Drakken has wished for on a hundred dandelions - in spite of being scientifically certain that has no effect, unless your wish is to grow a lot more dandelions. Now that she is, to deny her would require a stupidity Drakken doesn't possess.

Anymore.

For all he knows, this baby might _need_ pickles straightaway to develop properly. He cannot leave Shego's health - and her baby's - up to chance!

After all, Shego's his best friend. Practically his sister. The child will be his niece or nephew.

And, besides, pregnant women can get awful huffy.

"Very well." Drakken lets his chest expand, right where the medal would touch if he were wearing it. "I shall retrieve your pickles! But you have to promise never again to call anything I'm eating disgusting!"

"Sounds doable." There's a click of sharp nails - Shego must be adjusting the phone. "As long as you aren't eating out of the garbage again."

"I did that _one_ time, Shego!" Drakken cries. "And it was an emergency! North Pole - hello?"

She knows. Her twitches come through loud and clear even without the aid of a video screen.

There's no point in continuing to argue, then, if it's not even an argument. Took him years to learn that.

Drakken bids Shego good-bye and hangs up, new zip in his veins, as if he's been wound back up. Well, you know, if he were a wind-up toy and it were that simple to re-energize.

He has to get ready, put his contacts back in - his eyes are accustomed to eight hours without them, and they protest. Oh, yeah, and get dressed. Only after he's struggled into a pair of trousers does he notice how weirdly they're bulging and realize he's pulled them on over his pajama pants.

 _You know, the stripes and the polka dots actually complement each other in the right light,_ Drakken decides once he's adequately clothed. Changing will take far too much effort, and he has to have plenty of it stored if he doesn't want to pass out on a grimy gas-station floor.

Which he doesn't.

Drakken steals outside - a figure of speech. (He's given up thievery, and how would one steal the entire "outside," anyway?) The hovercraft waits, freshly-waxed chrome gleaming in the round glow of a faraway streetlight. The whole world appears to be dusted with black and gone over with gray.

There's something almost mystical about it, as if such an hour is reserved for nocturnal creatures and folklore beings. A small splinter of fear creeps in at all that darkness. Still - journeying on a pickle quest before the sun and ninety-eight percent of Middleton's population are up? It'll be quite an adventure!

Who knows when he'll get this opportunity again?

The tingles of the vines below Drakken's skin declare nothing in those shadows shall harm him. This dark is only physical, and it _will_ let him back out.

Chanting to himself, _It's okay, it'll be all right_ \- a refrain he doesn't need to use much in the daytime anymore - Drakken turns the keys in the ignition. The motor hums to life, that sound Eddy loves so much.

The flight to the nearest gas station is mostly billowing darkness split by orange at every intersection. High above the streetlights' glare, Drakken can pick out a few faint stars, and his thoughts drift to Global Justice's Blast Evaporator. They still need to figure out what temperature it freezes at, in case a villain decides to use a freeze ray instead of a death ray, and Drakken's pretty sure some of them will. Much less graphic.

It's not easy to miss the gas station, glowing so heavenly white from the inside. After countless late-night schemes in countless evil lairs with the lights on extra-bright against the pitch-black outside, that's something Drakken's used to. They aren't good memories, but the atmosphere still thrills right up his spinal column.

In fact, Drakken's rubbing his hands together as he parks the hovercraft next to a red - what are those things called, Jeeps? The night air hangs cool and gives him the urge to narrate the way old-time radio announcers would do. _Ooh, what's gonna happen no-ow?_ Drakken thinks, feet skidding on the blacktop and landing him very close to the red Jeep-object.

Maybe too close. The car's yellow eyes flash at him, and he jumps high as a streetlight.

Okay, so he's not fearless. So what?

Drakken finds himself skipping into the one giant room. There's no cheer of exaltation when he enters, which was once _his_ greatest midnight craving. People smile at him, though, and Drakken much prefers that to the furrows, the pursing, the otherwise suspicious tweaks to their expressions.

And almost instantly, an aroma every bit as marvelous as the LEDs sticks itself straight up his nostrils and begs to be test-driven. Mmmm. With the chemical mixture of dough, cooking oil, and sugar, it can only be. . .

Donuts! Drakken lifts his nose to take another long inhale. _Ahhhh_. As an experienced donut-eater, he knew they made them early in the morning, but he never realized it was _this_ early.

The fumes - no, that's too ugly a word, reserved for skunks and cologne spills where the delivery truck tips over on the highway - whatever they are, they seem to waggle an inviting finger straight under Drakken's nose and tug him along. He follows them giddily. Past the display that promotes bite-sized Butterfingers, which he never quite understood. Everything's bite-sized if you've got a big enough mouth. Straight to the source. The glass front nearly bursting with trays and trays and trays of -

Donuts!

Glazed ones. Frosted ones. Ones with sprinkles. And - oh, can it be true? - one that appears to be chocolate with streaks of cinnamon running through it.

Drool drips on the counter. (His, unless the ceiling's suddenly salivating.)

Drakken's ready to order one - no, make that one of each! - but shakes his head at his reflection. No. A straight shot of sugar first thing in the morning, and he'll be spinning in circles all day.

Besides, he's on a mission. Shego and her baby are having a Gherkin Emergency, and he has been selected to be their hero, a twenty-first century version of those cowboys who rode through sleet and snow to deliver lifesaving medicine to a sick woman.

Without the sleet and snow (although Drakken thinks he's heard it's supposed to drizzle this afternoon).

Drakken rotates his body at a turn-your-back angle, and his gaze smashes right into something that sends his appetite fleeing in terror. A box stocked with dainty little cupcakes that _anyone_ can probably eat in one bite, festooned with frosting and sparkling with sugar glitter. The tag that holds the lid down boasts, "Mixed-flavor gourmet cupcakes."

He flips around, hand over mouth. He's gotten to the point where he can read the word "cupcakes" without wanting to vomit, but "gourmet cupcakes" still give him the tummy twizzles.

Talk about _bursting_. . .

Drakken yawns into his open palm. He could use a cup of that newly brewed coffee he's smelling. It's a pleasant smell in any form, even though he can't drink it black; it's like cyanide to his taste buds, and Shego laughs at him for sticking to lattes and mocha frappes.

Farther down the aisle, breakfast wraps fall from the top of a cycling rack to the bottom and get rolled back up again, fresh grease glistening on their thin skins. The Do Not Touch sign warns of extreme heat that screams with a thousand potential chemistry experiments.

This time, Drakken proves it's not the ceiling who's suddenly salivating. For one thing, that's so many sibilants that his saliva production skyrockets even _mentally_ saying them.

Farther beyond the wraps are every kind of drinks known to mankind. Beer, iced tea, cocoa moo. . . and, of course, the coffeemaker.

 _Master?_ A flower taps somewhere around his cerebellum. _The mission?_

Right. Drakken squares himself and marches into the aisle that shelves the more regular, everyday varieties of food. He passes chips, salad dressing, mustard and ketchup, and there. . .

The long-sought-after pickle jars, exactly the same as the one he once slaved for a week to open, with no success. He grinds his underbite at the reminder.

A-ha! Drakken swoops down like an eagle and snatches the jars from the shelves, pretending he's Spider-Man rescuing them from the clutches of a burning building. Do burning buildings have clutches? Drakken can't be sure, especially at 4:45 in the morning.

With a jar tucked under each arm, Drakken projects his body toward the counter, only his shoes don't get as much traction as he calculated and he winds up sprawling next to a cardboard display with abs and biceps. Pictures of men jog across the front of the box like gazelles. Buff gazelles.

Drakken struggles his way back to his feet and stares. He hooks a finger onto the item on display, and he's wondering exactly why bodybuilders are being used to advertise a bottle that Shego's baby could likely drink out of when the time comes, when a voice says, "I wouldn't if I were you, dude."

He turns around, almost losing a jar in the process. A man stands there, a youngish man with a six-pack of muscles carved out under his shirt and one of soda balancing effortlessly on his shoulder.

Their eyes meet. Well, this guy's eyes meet Drakken's flesh. His lips are molded around The Question, but they don't have that hateful pull-back. Not even at Drakken's clothing, which looks like he got dressed in the dark, and for a very good reason. . . he did.

Drakken deliberately decides to be good-natured about it. He puts the jars down and digs into his jacket pockets, coming up empty. "Blast! I must have left the 'So You Just Saw The Blue Guy' pamphlets at home!"

Those come in plenty handy. No one asks about the scar much, because people know where scars come from. And most everybody understands the vines since they've seen him on the news.

The robin's-egg shade, though? Still a lot of questions about that.

"You can just tell me," the guy says. His voice is relatively gentle. Relatively safe.

Drakken closes his eyes and sees the pamphlet behind them. What are its words? He paws for them. "One day, I had a lab accident that permanently stained my melanin blue. This condition does me no harm, except nastier cuts don't heal very well." He motions to the approximate location of his scar. "Ergo, this. And it is absolutely, one-hundred-percent, scientifically-proven, _not_ contagious. You can't catch it from me."

No snickering. No gasps. Drakken's eyes open and focus on the man's blessedly straight face, with only a hint of amusement resting at its edges. And it's not of the jeering sort.

"Now. . ." Drakken glances down at the bottle in his hands, the one he almost forgot about. "What were you saying I wouldn't want? This?"

"It's an energy drink," the man says. "Loaded with caffeine. I've been watching you hop around here, dude, and I think you've got more energy at five in the morning than most of us do all day."

Even though it's not quite five yet, Drakken nods him on.

The guy grunts. "I mean, unless you _like_ lying awake all night and feeling like you need to pee every five seconds."

"Ew, no!" Every single night of his villainous career, staring glassy-eyed at clock-red numbers that keep getting later and later, every part of his body yelling a different complaint, dive-bombs his mind. Drakken drops the bottle before its sleep-stealing caffeine can seep into his system and drag him back there. He hops so far away from it that he just barely misses colliding with another shelf.

The amusement spreads. "That's what I thought." The guy adjusts his strong grip on the sodas. "See ya around, bud."

 _What a pleasant fellow._

Drakken retrieves his pickles and makes his way to the checkout. The cashier rings him up, giving him that once-over you give people when you're not entirely sure if they're a crazy person or not.

"It's for my sister," he feels the need to explain. "She's preg -"

The word jams in Drakken's voicebox. He can think it by now, but _say_ it? His cheekbones sizzle as if they've poked their pointy selves into a fireplace.

"She's. . . um. . . great with child."

For the love of marshmallows - of all the options he had to put it differently - why did he have to choose that one? Drakken can almost hear Shego in his head, smirking, _Biblical much, Doc?_

He doesn't know how to remedy this, so Drakken falls back on a Plan B that rarely fails, not since his reformation. He grins the underbite into full view and, sure enough, is rewarded with a smile from the cashier in return.

"Have a nice night," she says. "And congratulate her for me."

"You bet." Drakken salutes to seal the promise and accepts the offer of a bag and loops it over one wrist while he digs for the hovercraft keys. Not good for the lower back. . .

The things he'll do for Shego.

Drakken's surprised by the sky when he steps back outside, the homey little bell tinkling behind him. The pitch-black has already faded into a softer, closer-to-daylight gray.

Hmmm. Why do people say "pitch-black" instead of, perhaps, "black-pitch"? That sounds pretty dramatic. Of course, it also has the suggestion of a throw you're not allowed to use in baseball. . . baseball is the sport where people pitch, right?

It makes him feel a little more animated as he walks back to the hovercraft. Not animated like a Disney movie. In the other way - which, come to think of it, probably comes from the first way. Like you're as lively as a cartoon character.

Drakken swings himself into the hovercraft to loosen slept-bent tendons. Most of his focus, however, remains on completing his mission.

"Hang on, kiddo!" he shouts over the _whooooosssh_ of his hovercraft's ascent. "Uncle Drakken's coming!"

 **()()()()()()**

Shego answers the door on his first knock. Her eyes glow when she sees him - a new, wonderful development.

"Your pickled vegetables, milady," Drakken says, ducking for a gallant bow, one hand extending the bag with the two pickle jars. He keeps the other hand hovering around his mouth, because he's pretty sure he still has moss breath.

"Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you, Dr. D!" Shego pops the lid off one jar, first try - seriously, how _does_ she do that? - and actually _crams a pickle into her mouth_. She never lets him get away with that. Not once!

Drakken can feel clouds threatening on his face, so he intentionally shifts over to examining his for-all-intents-and-purposes sister. Shego's reached what she calls the stage where she feels like a hippo, which Drakken isn't seeing. Personally, he thinks she looks more beautiful than ever, her stomach rounded in that miraculous way that cries, "I'M BEARING NEW LIFE!"

"I've never liked pickles in my _life_ ," Shego says - once she's swallowed. At least she's retaining some manners. "What are you doin' to me, kid?"

This, Drakken assumes, is not aimed at him.

Shego cradles her belly the way he tends to on Thanksgiving afternoon, only on her the gesture is immediately, powerfully maternal. She looks younger than ever without her been-there-done-that confidence, and Drakken has to sit on his hands and hook his feet up under the ottoman so he won't run to protect her. She's still strong, the strongest person he knows. Which means she's no damsel in distress, _and_ she can throw him through the wall if he tries to put her in that role.

"So - uh - " Shego points inside the bag. "Why are there _two_ jars?" Her cheeks have plumped out some, too (not a lot - doesn't need to be, since they've always been so thin), so she can't smirk as effectively. It's a nice change.

"Wha - oh. That." Drakken grins at her. "No one should have to eat pickles in the middle of the night alone."

Shego screws the lid off his jar - which is a little embarrassing - and obliges him when Drakken holds up a pickle for a toast - which is the very definition of friendship, albeit not one you're likely to find in your dictionary. "To the baby!" he says.

Him on the ottoman, her on the couch, their shoulders huddle, Shego's bare in a neon-green sleep shirt with a minimum amount of ruffles that must be the very latest thing (although Drakken doesn't stay very caught up on fashion, especially not _maternity_ fashion). It's exactly what they've done during thousands of scheming conferences, only without the constant fear of the police and the sharp edges of what Drakken can now identify as guilt.

"How is. . . it. . . doing?" Drakken says. He hates calling a member of his family "it," but he doesn't know the gender. And "they" implies twins, which is a whole different kettle of formula.

Do they put formula in kettles?

Shego fake-scowls down at the lump that houses the baby. "As well as can be expected. Doesn't tell time yet. This is gonna be a nocturnal kid, I can tell."

Drakken doesn't ask _how_ she can tell. Shego just _can_ , in an untangled mind that's one big clear space.

"Do you know if it's a boy or a girl yet?" he asks instead - in the hopes of securing a definite pronoun.

"Nope. I decided I wanna be surprised."

Hmmm. Drakken mulls over that. He loves that phrase, _mulls over_ \- sounds so professional. He also loves surprises. Provided they're good ones. Still, he can't see how the revelation of a baby's gender can be bad either way.

Not unless the baby's somehow a strange, genderless mutant, like that one on the Sci-Fi channel movie. And, to be fair, he/she/whatever was still a perfectly nice kid. . .

"It kicks now," Shego says.

The image of a sneakered foot rearing back for a blow - he doesn't know if it's from grade school or prison - paints itself in Drakken's memory, and he flinches. "Does it hurt?!" He doesn't mean to employ all of those exclamation points, or that small whimper he barely recognizes.

There's something almost absentminded in the flip of Shego's hair. How she's already used to this wondrous being inside her is beyond Drakken. "No. Not really."

 _Phew_. "What _does_ it feel like, then?" Drakken inches forward - he has to observe every detail of her reply.

"You have no idea if you've never had a person living in your gut," Shego says with a shrug. _Gut_ is not biologically accurate, but _womb_ still makes him blush, so Drakken goes with it.

"I don't know." Drakken grimaces. "Some of those cupcakes felt pretty alive."

Shego's lips twitch at him before parting for another bite of pickle. Even with her cheeks stuffed, she manages to look ladylike. Of course, that could partly be due to the whole pregnancy thing, and how currently only women can achieve -

 _Incoming blotches. Must bail out of sentence._

"Did you know your baby's growing some _teeth_ now?" Drakken says, testing if he can put the green gleam back in Shego's sleepy eyes. (It's so much prettier than the one on her hands.) "I mean in the jawbone, not through the gums. And it might have hair - even _eyebrows_!" He squeaks a little on that last bit, just from sheer joy.

 _I'm going to be an uncle!_ does jumping jacks in his mind.

Shego flops her wrist in Drakken's direction. "Ladies and gentlemen, my brother, the scientist." Her voice drones deadpan, but not in the fashion that would indicate she wants to chop his eyebrow in half.

Okay, double phew. She's not too baby-cranky tonight. "That's the spirit!" Drakken cries. "Keep your sense of humor!"

Saying _humor_ flips a switch in his head, and behind Mental Door Number One is the joke he invented last week and promptly forgot. Until now!

Drakken clears his throat for Greatest Impact. "Okay, Shego, here's a little riddle for you. Why should you be wary of 0.12187?"

"Uh - "

He rushes on, because she's smart enough to figure it out, beat him to the punch line, if he gives her enough time. "Because it's Seven's Deadly Sine!" he says.

Shego's face blanks, as if he's clicked _Select All_ and then _Delete_. "Say what?"

"You know!" Drakken loses his battle with laughter and is now concentrating on producing a deep, manly chortle rather than the shrill giggles of lost sleep. "In trigonometry! 0.12187 is the sine of seven degrees! And they abbreviate it as S-I-N. . ."

Nope. Shego's still wearing that looks that wonders if he's come straight from Pluto.

Drakken deflates from the midsection, slumping his arms down to meet his toes. "Admittedly, it works better in writing," he says.

Ah, well. His goal was to evoke a twitch, even if it _does_ have to be at his expense. Pregnancy can have roughly the same effect on a woman's emotions as a Moodulator, and anything that frees Shego from pulling into herself like a miserable mystery - or, worse, lashing out - it's never fun to get heaved out a window - is pretty okay with Drakken.

Especially nowadays. Sometime last week, Drakken heard her muttering something about "stretch marks." He sort of understands what those are, having watched a very interesting demonstration with an uninflated balloon. And apparently women loathe having them.

That's one curb Drakken has no idea how to navigate around. He's always been much more likely to get gloomy about his body than Shego is about hers, though he's been getting better about it lately. He knows what it's like to duck your head in shame when someone points out a part that's flatter or rounder or shorter or longer than Someone thinks it should be.

But if Shego ever does, his heart might malfunction and his arteries might clog and his liver might. . . do whatever happens when livers go wrong.

Drakken looks at her now, softer in every sense than when he first met her, and his chest is overwhelmed by warm laps, as though there's an ocean in there and the tide is coming in. He wants so badly to tell her that he'd cure morning sickness and vaporize stretch marks and relieve her every weird ache if only he could. Might even be willing to stand between her and the pain, be her protective screen - selfless is an art he's still learning, but with Shego's it's more of an instinct.

 _I'd take it all away if I could._ Drakken sucks the words in his cheeks like a lollipop until they lose their flavor. They might be the wrong thing to say, and plasma punches rank below black coffee on his Best Ways To Wake Up list.

"Congratulations from the cashier. And. . .you're Shego," is what comes out of his mouth then.

"Really?" Shego's tone seems to shrug at him. "Thanks for the info. Amnesia often develops in the second trimester."

This is untrue. Drakken plasters fingertips to both temples and forces the nonsense noises back down into his lungs. Clear space, clear space, happy clear space. . . what did he _mean_?

There! In those shrubbery-covered letters he can always depend on.

"I mean you'll be fine," Drakken says. A bulge almost as big as Shego's baby chokes off his vowels. "No matter what happens."

Shego gives him a brow hike. Since thirty seconds go by without it knifing back down, Drakken concludes that she isn't upset. More like. . . touched, perhaps? That's a hard specimen to tag, since it's only been spotted five or six times in recorded history.

It pushes one last sentiment from Drakken, one he hasn't even tested yet. "And if you're ever not, I'm - I'm - I'm hereforyou," he blurts.

"Egad, the schmaltz," Shego says - around the twitching.

That's Shego for, _You'll be an awesome uncle._

Drakken raises another pickle high. "To - to - to - to -" Reformation? Convenience stores? Sliced bread?

Can't pick. Entire world is too wonderful.

"To being brave enough to go out in public dressed like _that_ ," Shego finishes for him. She nods at both the patterns he's wearing.

Sassy sisters who are growing people inside them?

What more could a man ask for?

Well, someone to appreciate his trig jokes. But Drakken's not about to complain.

 **~Still haven't decided who Shego would end up marrying. I'm open to suggestions, though. . .**

 **Sorry if I messed up on any of the pregnancy details. I didn't do extensive research, but I did Google some things and talk to my mom some.**

 **And the "it works better in writing" line I snatched from an episode of Gravity Falls. (Coming back in July! wOOt!) :D~**


	3. Best Laid Plans

**~All right, we get to hear from Shego this time! :D**

 **Sorry for the wait. Hope it was worth it. And thanks to everyone who reviewed, including Buba again. That's a verrrry interesting idea about a husband-for-Shego. . . Very interesting indeed. *strokes fake beard*~**

Breaking into the Smithsonian had been the fun part.

Shego didn't really buy into "destiny" or "fate" or any of that other fairy-tale junk, but it was hard _not_ to believe she'd been born to jimmy a lock, to snag a guard's badge, and especially to kick-flip through a zigzag of lasers. Dr. D had given her baby powder to throw around the room in case they were invisible. She'd say one thing for the guy: he knew his chemistry.

Even if he couldn't have limboed under even _one_ laser to save his _life_.

"The plan is remarkably simple," Drakken had told her that morning, that mad-scientist pace they must have taught in evil-nerd school kicking into high gear across the lair floor. "And almost assuredly foolproof."

Drakken scooped up what looked like one of those miniature coat hangers Shego had seen on the home shopping network. As soon as it was in his palm, it changed from red to the exact black of his glove. "These are the Universal Deleters," he said, like she'd just been _dying_ to know. "They blend into any background, and they're powerful enough to erase any and all of the famous works of art inside the Smithsonian. Of course, the painting's pattern will be preserved inside these little beauties." Drakken let out a cackle that was a zillion times scarier than anything else about him Shego had seen so far. "But _they_ don't know that."

Whoa. It was impressive enough that Shego had to hunt for something sassy to say.

"They'll need to be placed .2 inches to the left side of every painting in the museum," Drakken said, rubbing his hands together as if he were warding off frostbite. "That's where you come in, Shego."

 _HECK yeah!_ blasted through Shego's head, but the only movement she allowed herself was one eyebrow hiking slightly. Drakken had enough emotions for her and six other people.

At this point, he was stuck on excited-and-trying-to-be-suave-about-it. "It's genius - you're so good at sneaking under the radar. And we've only been a team for a few weeks!" he continued. "People don't associate you with me yet! That way, even if _you_ get busted, _I'll_ still -"

Drakken's words stopped as if he'd abruptly taken a punch to the kidneys. He must have seen the death glare Shego was bulleting right into his eyes. The bruised-looking bags under them did a weird scrunching thing.

"That is to say," Drakken backpedaled, about five keys higher than his usual baritone, "if one of us is busted, the other will still be around to help them out."

Eh. As saves went, it wasn't _that_ bad.

"So then what?" Shego asked.

"We shall fly cross-country!" The dude actually spread his super-long arms even farther - good grief, he had to demonstrate _every_ thing with them. "All the way to California!"

Drakken unrolled a map onto his already messy-with-blueprints desk and jabbed Route 5. "There's a federal weapon reserve there," he said. "We shall appear before them to make our ransom demand! Give us all the world-conquest weapons stashed in their four walls, or every last canvas in the Smithsonian gets a _clean slate_!"

 _Okay, the first part of the plan was hard to sass. This one? Not so much._

"Question," Shego said, sticking her own arm up.

Drakken nodded at her. "Yes, you in the front."

"Can you tell me why you don't just invent those weapons yourself?" Shego heard her voice squeezing out the way it always did when she was _that_ close to screaming, _This is so lame!_ "I mean, you made the Universal Deleters, so. . ."

She did NOT add, _You're smart enough._ She had to keep an aloof distance from this guy, even if he was the only halfway-nice supervillain she'd ever met.

Drakken caught the shoulders in mid-slump. "Ah, Shego, Shego, you have much to learn." He poked one delicate little finger into the air. "Never build what you can steal. I've done some calculations, and a good theft can conserve up to twenty hours of valuable scheming time!"

"Okey-doke."

Shego decided not to point out that he could have let the paintings out of the picture altogether if he'd just stolen the _weapons_ first and ransomed the _world_ with them. It was funnier to let Dr. D put those pieces together himself. Sort of like a cat with a laser pointer.

Not that she minded helping if it was legit important. So far, though? Not shaping up to be.

Shego slunk down the steps of the Lincoln Memorial now and headed for the cluster of cherry trees where Drakken was "hiding" the hovercraft. He perked up like some pound mutt who'd just gotten his first visitor, shaking pink blossoms out of his spikes.

"Shego! You've returned! The mission was a success, then?" Drakken asked, hands bouncing over the dashboard.

She was seriously considering saying, _No, I got caught and I'm obviously in jail_ , but sarcasm was a language Dr. D didn't speak. Shego didn't have time to clean up his tangled brain right now. And why risk blowing it with the one guy who hadn't hit on her?

"Yep. We're good to go, Chief," she said instead, shooting him a thumbs-up.

Shego didn't know which was bigger - Drakken's grin or the pride that swelled his chest in some macho-wannabe pose. "Excellent work, Shego! Now we can move on to Phase Two, and victory will soon be ours!"

Huh. The genuine appreciation there kinda surprised her. It made her brothers sound like the ungrateful little clods they were.

* * *

It did _not_ make it any easier to fly cross-country with the man. As in, _the entire sixth-grade population called. They want their annoying factor back._

Drakken had insisted on introducing her to every single switch and button and dial the hovercraft had, so slow and steady it smacked of patronizing. He couldn't execute a turn without being all, "See, Shego? I used _this_ steering mechanism," until she was ready to smack HIM.

Shego had finally said, "Yeah, I got it," in _her_ most patronizing, measured-out tone, and it shut Drakken down like her voice was a dominant dog.

Now he'd flipped the radio on and was singing along to some boy band from Shego's high-school days that she wouldn't have guessed were still on the map.

Not _exactly_ the type of behavior you'd expect from the world's future conqueror. Plus, she'd found out recently that the guy was thirty-eight. Almost old enough to be her _dad_. Between the lanky arms and the smooth face that looked like it had never needed to meet a razor, Shego could have sworn the Doc was fresh out of college.

And even though his moods and maturity swung faster than he could flip channels, he generally leveled off at somewhere around ten. Sometimes that it could be charming. Most of the time, it was obnoxious.

Shego turned to study her employer as he worked the controls, still humming to himself. Strands of his hair were wagging in the breeze like sea anemones. Dr. D didn't keep his ponytail all groomed the way Mego did with his. Not a bad change of pace.

His ego wasn't as polished, either. Sure, it held its own when it came to sheer size, but _come on_. He was totally layering it over something else that he wanted to smother to death. Shego could see it peeking out of his eyes when he thought she wasn't paying attention.

She was always paying attention, just not to every piece of science gobbledegook that came out of his mouth. Studying people was the first step to learning their weaknesses, a nifty little skill she'd picked up during those just-kill-me-now years as a superhero. No one and nothing was gonna get the drop on her again.

"Are you bored, Shego?" Drakken asked after about an hour. Shego was about to give him some mental credit for noticing when he added, "Because I am."

Naturally.

"I know!" Drakken broke into that megawatt smile again. "We can play the license plate game."

The disgusted expression rose up all on its own. "On _what_? Airplanes?" Shego said.

As soon as the snark had crunched between her teeth, Shego hated it. Plug up her nose and force her to talk through it, and she could have been Mego. It was almost enough to throw her over the side of the hovercraft to hurl.

Employers didn't put up with it well, either - especially bosses like Dr. D, who had plenty of complexes _without_ Shego informing him what she _really_ thought of his plans.

The rant she was waiting for wasn't what came out of Drakken next. It was a giggle, the nervous-shrill opposite of his usual boom. "Oh. . . right. . . airplanes don't really have licenses, do they?" he said.

Shego held back a thousand snappy retorts, most of them involving airplanes flying straight through the empty space between Drakken's ears.

And the boy band returned for another thirty minutes. Shego had no clue _what_ she would have done if Drakken hadn't stopped in the middle of one amazingly-NOT-horrendous note and rubbed at his stomach. "Shego, I'm hungry!" he said.

Check that. "Announced." Sheesh, the volume probably broadcast all the way back to the Smithsonian.

No news there. Dr. D started every day by either binging on a box of donuts or skipping breakfast altogether so he could scribble down not-all-there evil ideas until he passed out. Today had been the latter, going off the lack of crumbs on the table when Shego had buzzed in.

"I'm not," Shego said. "Because I ate breakfast and lunch. . . "

 _Not tacking on "like a normal person."_

". . . and you could've too," she said.

That always-pouty lower lip of his plumped out to brood even more. "I was going to ask you to swipe me a snack from the gift shop, but - "

Drakken didn't finish. He didn't have to. _I thought you'd make fun of me_ was smeared across his face-like-a-ten-year-old's.

Shego felt a momentary flash of pity and a much-longer hunch that Dr. D wouldn't be in top form until he got something to eat. No way was she going to listen to his belly growl all the way out to California.

"Fine," Shego said with a sigh. "We'll stop somewhere."

Drakken faded in the seat as if he were working to make himself even smaller. Really ruined the "I'm your boss, Shego, not an inconvenience, and don't you forget it!" he spat in her direction. Whatever it was that lurked behind his eyes flashed in disbelief at his own self.

Shego didn't even let herself blink. Drakken had started a power struggle and lost it in the same sentence. That took some talent.

As long as _she_ kept it together - yup. His gaze dropped from Shego's and gave her a smooth swipe of satisfaction.

She was pretty sure she could feel the upper hand swapping owners.

Shego thought about that as she followed Drakken's slouching, blue-clad back into the first restaurant he'd deemed "in his price range" - a cheapo, fakey Mexican place that made Bueno Nacho look ritzy. She'd known for a long time she could kick just about anybody's tail, but this was a whole new dimension of control she'd never had before. All she had to do was be less touchy than Drakken - and, really, there were land mines less touchy than Drakken - and she'd always be the level-headed one by comparison.

And without Team Rainbow Dorks to run their fingernails down her spine, she'd settle for applying the rage like lipstick when needed.

Drakken would come up with the mondo-ambitious plans, and Shego would get _paid_ to find the holes in them and keep him on track?

Well, there were worse jobs. Working for some ogling little lech came to mind. So did waitressing at this dump.

The instant the doors opened, Shego was hit by a reek that screamed, _Come and get it!_ Ya know, to cockroaches.

Roaches and apparently Dr. D, who bounced his way up to the counter, already smiling his too-many-teeth smile, and ordered two medium burritos. Craning over his shoulder, Shego managed to glimpse a leaky refrigerator with a contaminated-looking cutting board sitting on top of it. The rest was screened-off and charcoal-colored, and Shego honestly wouldn't have been surprised if it had opened out to a slaughterhouse in back.

That did wonders for the ol' appetite.

"For here or to go?" droned the counter girl, her shirt freckled with what Shego hoped were hot-sauce stains.

Drakken's one big eyebrow furrowed as if he'd just been asked to list all forty-three presidents in order of height. "For here," he finally said, giving his neck a jerk to demonstrate who was in charge. He was _such_ an amateur at it.

"And you?" Stains asked Shego.

"I'll have a _bottled_ water," Shego said and stuck around to make sure Stains did, in fact, fetch it from the fridge. Who knew what type of scum they had swimming around in the stuff from the tap?

Way too quickly, a tray appeared with two wrapped-up chunks of something so raw and reddish-brown, it couldn't even be called meat. It was _flesh_. Shego liked to think she had a pretty high gross-tolerance, but the two meals she'd eaten turned to concrete.

Drakken, of course, grinned at them - a "thanks" was probably too much to ask - and made a big deal of leading the way to the table directly under a window so dark with stains it looked bulletproof. Someone could have died right in the very chair she was careful to rest as little of her backside on as possible. Even Shego's sense of fun wasn't _that_ sick.

None of that seemed to have occurred to Drakken, who dug in as if he hadn't touched a crumb in months. Shego unscrewed the lid of her water bottle and took a few tentative sips.

"Are you on a diet or something?" Drakken said.

Shego couldn't hear any chauvinism between his greedy chomps, and it wasn't any use getting mad at Dr. D. He was just too. . .dense.

"Yeah," she said. "I try not to consume more than my recommended daily amount of _E coli._ "

"That's not something you can consume," Drakken said, cheeks hamster-full.

 _Did I say "dense" before? I meant, "skull-as-thick-as-a-Kevlar-vest."_

Shego groaned with the exhaustion she always made sure to stay one step ahead of. "I give up talking to you."

"So _are_ you on a diet?"

"No." Shego slowly lowered her forehead to the table.

"That's good," Drakken's meat-muffled voice replied. "I hate it when women do that. Besides. . . you look fine?"

Shego raised her head at a much slower speed than the sudden jolt-through-it demanded. That _might_ have been the sweetest thing a guy had ever said to her - if his mouth hadn't been dangling open, spilling dribbles of food she wouldn't have fed to a wolf.

 _Nast-ee._ The dude had to have a gut as hard as his head.

Shego flipped herself around in her chair to examine the rest of the room. For some _weird_ reason, she wasn't super-comforted by the flies walking around the rims of the trash bins or the hardened red blob on the counter that had probably once been a pool of ketchup - like who used _ketchup_ on Mexican stuff, anyway?

Seriously, this whole place was a health inspector's stroke-waiting-to-happen.

"Oh, come now, Shego!" Drakken's finger poked the air again, thank goodness. If he'd done that shake-it-under-her-nose thing, Shego _would've_ popped him one - plasma and all. "This is a perfectly respectable enterprise! They don't even appear to have pests!"

Shego directed one of her own glove-blades at the untouched Death-in-a-Wrap. "Annnnd do you know what kind of meat that is?"

Another huge chomp. "What's your point?"

Never mind. He was beyond hope.

"So what's your favorite superweapon, Shego?" Drakken said. His boots kicked joyfully above the floor they didn't reach. He didn't even bother to whisper. Stains already had her MP3 buds in her ears.

Shego didn't blame her. She'd pick hip-hop over Drakken anytime.

 _Since you asked, my day was fine. And yours?_

How did someone answer that kind of question? "Superweapons" or whatever they were called all looked pretty much the same to Shego - she read them as signs that you were too chicken to do the dirty deed yourself. Avarius's. The Mathter's. Electronique's. They'd all been as dumb as everything else about them, as everything else about Go City in general.

Shego felt everything pulling to a point at her chin. Mego had always said she looked like an arrow poised to shoot when that happened.

"Don't know." Shego shrugged. "Haven't had much experience with them."

 _Not on this side of the law, at least._

Her bowstring tugged tighter.

Drakken blinked his almost-overbright eyes at her. Shego saw the extra sheen of contact lenses in them. He had to have been a little four-eyed chump at some point.

Eventually he shrugged, too, as if she had a right to her triggers. That, or he just didn't care. "Well, if you see one you like, point it out to me and I'll make sure to include it in the ransom demand." He leaned his forearms forward and brought his hands into a clumsy fold right over some disgustingly sticky spot. "Sort of a 'Welcome to the team' present."

Drakken bobbed his head like he had a hip-hop beat of his own going on under that tech-geek 'do. "I bought my henchmen all grapefruit baskets when they first entered my employment - of course, they were much less expensive back then. I think grapefruits were in season. . ."

 _Swell. Some people's bosses give them health insurance. Mine hands out grapefruits and. . . I dunno, atomic blasters?_

Shego couldn't help but snort every time he referred to the rest of the team as "henchmen," especially with that dramatic trill preparing to roll an _r_ that never came. It wasn't exactly like they were the Mafia or, heck, even the Apple Dumpling Gang. They were plush-muscled and bordering-on-gentle and more dweebish than Drakken himself.

Still, the sight of Drakken tipped toward her, expectation shining all over his blue skin, did something to the corners of her lips. They curved up into a smirk she'd never been able to plant on anyone who drove her as nuts as the Doc could. A happy Drakken was Christmas-morning-as-a-kid personified. Now Smug Drakken, _him_ she would be glad to clobber.

Since it wasn't Smug Drakken's little overconfidence job staring back at her, Shego granted him a "sounds. . . great." It was the most enthusiasm she could fake, and he might bob himself right across the table if she didn't throw him a bone.

As it was, he lit up like the Las Vegas strip, an exclamation mark wrapped around his entire body. Drakken's feet kicked the underside of the chair and dumped it to the floor. The rest of his clumsiness hit the ground not too far behind.

Stains didn't even glance up from her music.

Lovely. Shego tried not to picture all the germs Drakken was standing up from and brushing off his lab coat in embarrassment. What really could have been a hip-hop beat _did_ start grumbling from somewhere deep in his throat.

Man, it was a crack-up when he did that.

Shego's lips kept twitching as she sipped from her water again. This mess of a man would create an absolute _disaster_ as ruler of the world.

It'd be pretty fun to watch.

* * *

It wasn't just world conquest. Drakken brought disaster to everything he touched. Shego got another great reminder of that almost as soon as they arrived at the generic Midwestern hotel.

Drakken's bird-legs did some kinda I-think-I'm-cool-swagger up to the counter and he dropped one elbow onto it. Shego could have predicted that it would catch on the edge of his funnybone and he would yelp like a Mastiff trying to squeeze in through the kitty door. There was something familiar about that, too, something that got a tic jumping in Shego's jaw.

"We need a room," Drakken said.

 _Yeah, we passed "disaster" about twenty miles back._

The Doc didn't get a chance to crash-and-burn his way through another sentence before Shego was curling her glove-blades around his wrist and somehow resisting the urge to claw it to shreds as she dragged him aside. "Excuse us for a sec," she told the check-in woman, who had yet to look at anything other than her fountain pen.

Shego shoved Drakken as close to the wall as she could without indulging her bring-it side and slamming him against it. If this loser had just been delaying hitting on her until now, she'd backhand him all the way back to D.C.

But he just stood there, hound-eyed Dr. D, looking about as sleazy as Forrest Gump.

 _Oh, for the love of -_ Shego's thoughts snapped off in sharp pieces. _Can he REALLY be this stupid?_

"We need _two_ rooms, Doc," she hissed at him.

Pucker lines formed on Drakken's forehead. The rest of him was completely glazed over, as if his brain had switched itself off.

Yup. He could be _that_ stupid.

"Why?" Drakken's thunderstorm voice rattled the way teenagers' did right before they cracked. The lines were digging deeper, so that he actually couldn't have been mistaken for somebody her age anymore.

"You did not just ask me why."

"Yes, I did! What's the _problem_?" Sure enough, here came the crack - and there went the neck, arching up to meet it. "I do this with my henchmen all the time."

Shego plastered on a smile that felt more like an excuse to bare her teeth at him. "Annnnnnd what's the difference between me and your henchmen?" she said.

Drakken blinked like he was wading through a waist-high pile of garbage. Probably was. "Well - you're smarter."

Shego resolved to _never_ let on how grateful she was that he'd thought that before "prettier." "What else?"

"More competent. Not as clumsy. You don't build model airplanes. . ." Drakken fanned his fingers into a checklist that he immediately seemed to forget about.

Definitely Dumpster-diving in his mind. If all the pop-psychology magazines were true and men _did_ "compartmentalize," Drakken was more the type to stuff everything under his bed and hope for the best.

". . . you live in your own apartment. You have much, much longer hair because you're a wom - " Drakken stopped and went as close to still as Shego had ever seen him.

 _Come on. Just a littttttle farther. You can do it._

"You're a woman," Drakken said again, and it was even dumber this time. He stared down at his hands as if he'd scribbled a cheat sheet onto them this morning and then crammed them into fists.

Shego couldn't _help_ saying, "Ding-ding-ding! We have a winner!"

If Drakken noticed the snark she'd let slip, he wasn't in any shape to swoop down on it. He was rocking back and forth on the heels his gaze was basically stuck to. "And that makes it. . . weird somehow?"

Shego could almost hear him reaching for his know-it-all side and coming up several ego-trips short. He looked stunned that he'd found something usable under the bed.

"Yeah, it makes it weird," she clenched out, firing an antomic-blaster round with her eyes. Her plasma was the only thing she could even _think_ of restraining at this point.

And only the _itty-bitty_ fact that her car was parked back at the Caribbean lair kept her from strolling smack out the door and taking off.

Drakken's eyes actually crossed. "Because. . . because. . . because. . . "

 _Tell me I'm not hearing this._

"Oh, sweet Mergatroid." Drakken's hand plastered over his mouth so tightly it muffled what came out to a whisper and made the still-crossed eyes bulge from their baggy sockets. His cheeks blushed in sloppy patches. The obvious embarrassment was so thick he sounded asthmatic.

Okay, good. He figured it out.

As Shego watched him shudder away from the thought like it was a pit viper, she knew she'd been right: Dr. Drakken was a mammoth idiot.

And he was a decent guy.

"Right again." Shego slipped behind Drakken and gave his shoulders a nudge. "Now go fix it."

Drakken nodded and slunk off, moving out of the driver's seat and letting Shego take the wheel. Not even aware that he was doin' it.

It was a pretty good feeling, being on top.

Check-In Chick finally got around to looking at Drakken - more like gawking at him. Between the pigment problem and the whole I-haven't-slept-a-wink-in-three-weeks thing he had going on, Shego couldn't really blame her for thinking he should probably be checking into the ER instead.

"We need _two_ rooms," Drakken said, actually holding up two fingers for emphasis. "Because -" he glanced left, right, back straight ahead and dropped his volume until the thunderstorm was just a sprinkle - "we're not married."

 _Come on, Doc, you've had a whole_ year _to enter the 21st century._

Drakken turned back again and shot Shego a snotty little I-have-just-saved-your-reputation look. She rolled her eyes.

That was it - that was what she recognized and wanted to pulverize. That _I-know-best-let-me-take-care-of-you_ expression on a face that couldn't begin to be responsible even for itself. Square off the edges, and it could have been Hego's.

Shego dug her blades into the nearest fake plant.

The check-in girl treated Drakken like she would love to take him home and fix him supper and wipe his bib. That must have been the only type of attention he ever got from the female population. Shego smirked.

 _What a ladies' man._

Once they had their key cards, Drakken lit up brighter than the muted bulbs and held the flat piece of plastic triumphantly in the air. You woulda thought he'd taken over the world already.

"Let's go up and see our rooms!" Drakken suggested, joy bubbling out around his words. "Oh, and Shego, thanks for helping me see what the difference was between you and the henchmen. I get that you don't want me seeing you in your nightgown."

 _Did he seriously just say. . ._

And somehow he found the breath to keep going with, "All I could really think of was that you were smaller than the henchmen but still a lot athleticer."

Well then.

Shego decided to follow Drakken's "lead" and steer him up to their rooms before he made any more mincemeat out of the English language.

* * *

The rooms turned out to be joined with a door that must have been rescued from the '30s. Not a bad compromise, as far as Shego was concerned. It would make scheme coordinating a lot easier, and it meant she wouldn't have to listen to him babble in his sleep, because she had a strong suspicion dozing off didn't equal shutting up for Drakken.

He was already about to have a heart attack over his dinky little room. Within three minutes, he'd bounced on the bed, blasted himself with the custom hairdryer, buried his face in the towels under the sink, yanked open the bedside drawer to make sure the Bible and the Yellow Pages were where they were supposed to be, flipped through all thirty channels, and yelled things into the air conditioner just to hear them warble. Like they weren't already doing that with the giggles that had been going the whole time.

Shego had the sudden image of America's Finest receiving a Crayola ransom note. Both the guffaw in her throat and Dr. D's grinning mug begged to be smothered.

"There's a heat lamp in the bathroom, Shego!" Drakken cried now. "With a red bulb and everything! It would make the perfect spot to house reptiles in the winter!"

 _Ohhh, that's_ got _to be it. Especially with those "No Pets" signed posted on every corner to throw people off._

Next thing she knew he'd be oohing and aahhing over the pebbled texture of the shower floor.

As freakishly babyish as he could be, though, in a lot of ways Dr. D was more mature than her brothers. At least he didn't do that fart-with-your-armpit sound all four of them found hilarious.

And at least he spun around right after his reptile comment with a wicked gleam behind the grin. "Reptiles such as alligators," Drakken said, hands rubbing expertly. "Or crocodiles. Depending on which one gets put on sale at HenchCo first. I've been thinking we need something besides just sharks. Variety is the spice of doom, after all."

Shego had to hand it to him: he talked a good game. When Drakken's eyebrow came down to brood and his posture pulled into rare straightness, he looked like a pro at this. Evil nerd school had taught him _some_ thing.

Under all that kid-junk, the man had the soul of a schemer. It just had a lot of trouble with some leftovers from a dreamer.

Which was where she came in.

It wasn't the dude's fault that he was a beanpole - he was OCD enough and vain enough to have built himself buff by now if he could've - and once Shego nudged him into the _real_ thick of things, he would definitely toughen up inside. For all the villain-potential he was practically soaking in, the Doc was too sensitive for his own good.

And windy as a tornado. Drakken marched right into Shego's room, dumped an armload of blueprints and schematics and scribbles onto her bed, and began to explain in _excruciatingly_ geeky detail every weapon he was hoping to filch. Shego's eyelids planted themselves at half-mast, and she wasn't convinced they would have stayed even THAT far open if she hadn't needed this job so bad.

On the other hand, Dr. D's squeamish cruelty was a little intriguing. Probably woulda been hog heaven for a shrink. All his plans basically involved Global Justice agents being strapped down to oversized conveyor belts, a switch being flipped, and them trundling their way to the machine that would _eventually_ boil them to death, while Dr. D puttered around in his lab, making Flubber or whatever he did in there. Shego wondered what was wrong with the point-and-shoot method like in the video games down at the old Go City arcade.

 _You mean the ones Hego hated? The way he disapproved of everything more violent than the Batman series that's as old as Drakken?_

As Drakken spewed a few more pages, alternating between too excitedly fast and too theatrically slow, Shego was reminded more and more of her oldest brother. The brother whose head she'd wanted to clamp into a nutcracker for about ten years now.

The details just kept coming, and Shego wasn't sure how much longer she could pretend to care.

She _did_ care, about the important part, the part where they won. Or, more likely, the part where Drakken was left to throw another plan on the ever-growing FAILURE pile.

Oh, yeah, and she was also interested in the part where Drakken would leave the room and let her hit the sack at a healthy hour. Dr. D had been half-right, like he tended to be: Shego didn't _especially_ want him seeing her in her nightgown.

 _And I'm begging any and all deities to spare me from the sight of Drakken in his boxer shorts._

So far, the only relief Shego had gotten came when Drakken jumped up to take a bathroom break. Even then, when he was gone for ten minutes and a red glow started spreading from under the door, she'd knocked, got no response, and opened it with her toe to find Dr. D moonwalking to some cheesy '70s song under the heat lamp. His blush had been angry but pale, the way Shego had kinda figured it would be.

Now Drakken was jabbing one of those fishbones he called fingers at one spreadsheet in particular. "This one I'm especially thrilled about. It turns foodstuff into sentient beings!" He chortled, a sound so loud Shego would've bet her nail file the people down in the pool heard it. "Was built for a healthy-eating rally at the local middle school. Got locked in cold storage after an entire wing of the gym was destroyed. It turns out cafeteria food is even nastier when it's alive."

Shego granted him a smile. "'Kay. That's actually pretty funny."

Not to mention there was something wild and devious glinting his palms-toward-the-ceiling pose into almost-psycho territory. She liked that side of him.

"Isn't it magnificent?" Drakken said, arms flinging out of control. "Imagine some guy just minding his own business, eating a burger and fries when - "

Drakken stopped abruptly and punched a hand to his chest as the glee spiraled right out of him. Chalky straight from his forehead to neck, he shot off the bed and skittered his quick little walk to the bathroom, over the sink. He burped, and up came the burritos.

 _And today, boys and girls, we'll be learning about cause and effect._

The choking noises brought a tug to Shego's own throat, but she slammed the door hard over it. You didn't grow up with four brothers - two of them easy picks for _Humans_ ' Top Loser List and two others who worshiped the ground they walked on - without witnessing your fair share of barf. Shego did her eye-rolling while he was busy puking and then stalked up to him.

Her boots squeaked to a halt on the bathroom tile. She hadn't expected him to be bubbling over with joy - it would take someone _way_ crazier than Dr. D to get his kicks throwing up. She hadn't expected him to be crying, either.

And he was.

These weren't a few quiet little tears, either. They were the big, from-the-pit kind that streamed down to join the muck he hadn't wiped off yet. Drakken clung to the sink, this-can't-be-happening-to-me hisses heaving out of him.

"Shego!" he hiccuped, turning what looked pretty close to desperation on her. "I threw up!"

His sunny-sky-shaded face was gray now, with a thick layer of green, like a little kid had scribbled over it with a crayon, and his already-scraggly spikes of hair were clinging to his forehead, highlighting the utter terror in his eyes. Frightened red veins bulged in them.

It. Was. Pathetic.

Shego snagged her mouth mid-fall. "Yeah, I know. I was there."

Drakken continued to sniffle as he wiped his chin with toilet paper and rinsed with a Dixie cup - all under Shego's direction, and all with a lot more tears than were necessary, as far as she was concerned. She could understand being a little shaken up, but - _oy_. This wasn't shaken up. This was kindergarten.

"Let's get you back to your own room," Shego said. He was lucky she didn't add, _so you can stink up YOUR bathroom and not mine_. She stuck out a hand that Drakken took cautiously, as if he _knew_ how tempted she was to toss him down the fire escape.

Shego steered him toward a bed - the one closest to the bathroom. From the pained look on Dr. D's face, he was going to be needing it for one reason or the other soon. Nasty.

She yanked down the blankets and sheets and curled them back up, anger slamming between her temples. Really, how was this any different from the whole baby-sitting thing?

Drakken lay down and nearly disappeared amid the thick folds of the mattress, losing his ponytail entirely in the puffy pillows. He seemed to shrink before Shego's eyes. _Help me. Help me. I went to work for a chump._

Welp. So much for the evil career. It was fun while it lasted.

"I'm too late, Shego!" Drakken cried. "They're onto me! They've acted first!"

Shego reined in her fists at her sides. "Who's 'they'?" she asked, surprised by how dead her own voice sounded.

"The L.A. weapon facility! They somehow learned of my plan, and now they've activated the Food Sentience Ray!" Drakken grasped his stomach and groaned. "They're turning it against me!"

Whoa-ho-ho-no.

She would've kicked him, right there in that non-gut gut, if she'd been able to do it without triggering its Mt. St. Helens act. The stupid gape on his lips when he gazed up at her - Shego wanted to rip them off.

"No one's ray-gunned your dinner, Dr. D," Shego made herself say. "This is food poisoning. Ever heard of it?" Without that last bit of sarcasm, she would have popped like one of Avairius's egg bombs.

If Drakken noticed how it snapped off her tongue, it wasn't what turned the cheekbones too sharp for the rest of him pink like marks of dishonor. Every bit of his energy was clearly going into his spit, "Of course I have!" All his charm musta been puked up, 'cuz the grin was nowhere within reach. "But you get that from eating weird things! Like raw eggs. . ."

". . . or undercooked burritos," Shego finished for him. Her tone was the farthest thing from kind, but she chalked the lack of cat-screech up to a victory.

Understanding finally bloomed inside Drakken's curly-lashed squint. He may have been a whole generation older, but the look he gave Shego didn't even reach his twenties. "Yes, well, at least _my_ name doesn't have a pronoun in it!" he growled.

 _That_ was his idea of a retort? It was so lame, she couldn't even smack him. Couldn't even be mad, for that matter.

". . . seriously?" Shego stabbed his frenzied gaze with her own calm until his dropped to his lap. Nice. "You just went there?"

"It looked brown to me. . ." Drakken said in a whimper that was probably supposed to be a grumble. He rapidly deflated against the pillows, and the stubbornness drained from him too. Shego scooted in a little closer to find out just what exactly was left behind.

The brown-blacks were immediately puddling again. With them that open and personal, she might as well have been reading his diary.

And that was it: two of the loneliest eyes she had ever seen.

Dr. Drakken was - a _wuss_.

 _Geez. Sorry I asked._ Shego slapped her hair back. _How could_ that _have gone any worse?_

Well, there _was_ that crawl across her skin reminding her she _could_ have seen him in his boxer shorts.

Ewwww. As if the puke wasn't bad enough.

"Go to bed, Drakken," Shego said. She couldn't dredge up any playful nickname, not with two tons of disappointment on her.

Shego watched that kid-face pucker, visibly deciding if it had the strength for a full-out tantrum. By now, she wouldn't have put it past him.

"You're not staying?" he said.

Whined. That was an actual whine.

This man didn't need a sidekick. He needed a nursemaid.

And Shego was _so_ done with that.

Done with mopping up puke and settling tempers and only being appreciated for holding everyone together. She could have been Shego or Clara Barton or Lizzie Borden - wouldn't matter to Drakken as long as she could bathe his ouchies.

Dr. D. dragged his sleeve down across the tears. Absolutely everything on him was soppy now. "Shego, what are we going to _do_?"

 _Dunno - you're the one always bragging about what a supreme genius you are._

"This is really, really bad," Drakken continued, the wails prepping to take the stage. "My tummy hurts."

The words sounded ridiculous in that big booming voice of his. Shego might have laughed if it hadn't been so painful to realize that, yeah, she was employed by a chump - with the maturity of a six-year-old. Not to mention the self-absorption, gosh. . .

Shego lifted the phone's receiver and clutched it until she'd talked herself out of chucking it at Drakken's stupid little head. "Fine, then. I'll call a doctor or something -"

"No! I hate doctors! They'll stick tubes in me and ask why I'm blue and prod everywhere, and I'll have to let them because they're medically licensed to snoop!" Drakken's whine was spewing like another bout of the heaves. "I want _you_ , Shego!"

There was trust in his stretch toward her. His snarly little keep-away-from-me 'tude was as totaled as any of his dorkus machines. Ticked off as she remained, Shego suddenly couldn't picture Drakken directing that at Lizzie Borden.

It didn't make her want to stay with him. She hadn't lost enough of her sanity to sit here and hold his hand and baby him through something he'd brought on him _self_ by being a cheapscape and, oh yeah, a moron.

He looked awful vulnerable, though, greener than Shego herself and all trembly around the mouth, like he was preparing to blow chow again. It wrenched her bitterness to a scuff-the-floor halt and knocked a plasma-roasting right off her list of options.

Her voice beat its own record for serenity when she said, "Hey, I'll be right next door if you need me" - and then immediately wanted to yank out her tongue. Had she just given Drakken a come-bug-Shego-in-the-middle-of-the-night card?

"If it's an emergency," Shego amended. She jerked her arms into a cradle across her chest and aimed what she knew was a hatchet look at her employer.

"How will I _know_ if it's an emergency?" Drakken asked around one of his infamous pouts. Strags of hair had come loose from his ponytail and were plastered against his sweat-dampened neck. The dude was going to smell like a septic tank by dawn.

 _And people HAVE died from food poisoning. You know, the people with the wimpy immune systems._

Annnnnnnd that would be Dr. D.

Her thoughts clicked back to the laptop still sitting in its case in the corner of her room.

Shego put up a back-in-a-sec finger - while Drakken went ahead and squalled his impersonation of a net-tangled dolphin anyway - and headed through the joining door. As her laptop booted up, she flicked the bathroom fan on to the max and shut the door. No way was she inhaling puke-fumes all night.

A few minutes later, she was back with a piece of paper she'd torn out of her notepad, which she handed off to Drakken. "Here," Shego said. "These are all the symptoms of minor food poisoning. You experience anything _not_ on this list, and you can come get me. Got it?"

Drakken studied the paper with a _super_ -suave stupor squinting the smooth little cheeks into muffin tops, as if he didn't know how to read. And with the energy run down in a way it hadn't ever been since Shego had met him, he might have actually gotten carded if he'd gone to buy anything harder than Pepsi.

"Otherwise," she said, "I'll see you in the morning."

Shego could almost _hear_ the rusty wheels scraping to scheme in Drakken's brain. She stopped them with a hand and, "As in, like, seven o'clock. Not one A.M."

Drakken seemed to drop deeper into the mattress. "Blast. Foiled again." How was that threadbare mumble related to the perfect example of what I-never-say-anything-that's-not-a-cheese-fest Hego called "peals of evil laughter"?

"Seriously. Just sleep it off already," Shego said. "It doesn't hurt when you're unconscious." _No, doy_ wasn't getting any easier to swallow.

Drakken's big, sad dark eyes drifted shut over the bulging lenses. Shego nudged his foot - the part of his body LEAST likely to trigger a quease-attack - with hers and added, "Take out your contacts if you can, or they'll permanently fuse with your eyeballs or something."

She watched Dr. D's eyelids collapse. His face folded over itself with the effort of proving he was still up for a fight. "If I'm in the bathroom," he sniffed, probably practicing to be king or emperor or whatever he was imagining himself as today.

This time, Shego couldn't hold back. "You'll be in the bathroom _plenty_ , Doc. Trust me."

The thin, peaches-and-cream sheets shivered.

Yeah, and she wasn't gonna stick around for it. "See you in the morning," Shego said.

"That you shall!" drifted from his bed. Drakken was rumbling again, but Shego didn't miss the despair flaking off his words like dandruff. "I am the mighty Dr. Drakken, and I will not be struck down by food-borne bacteria!"

 _Sure. You just keep telling yourself that._

Hey, let him delude himself if it kept him off her back 'till morning.

Shego turned with a snap and crossed back into her room, swiping a mini-spray of air freshener from Drakken's luggage on the way. He always packed so much random crud that there was barely any space for a change of clothes or a toothbrush - both of which he was gonna need big-time tomorrow. Right now, though, her bathroom needed _this_.

One of Drakken's wrists gave her a listless wave. For _both_ their sakes, that better be the last she saw of him tonight.

It was. Basically. The sound of his feet pounding the carpet, no doubt wearing down a path from bedside to bathroom, mixed with the sputtering air conditioner and turned into white noise after a half hour or so. When Shego woke up at four-by-her-clock and headed for the bathroom, she heard Drakken panting like a pug dog in his own.

Whatever icky thing he'd been doing must have been over, because the only other thing Shego picked up over his breathing was a chant of, "It's okay. Shego's right next door. Shego's here. Shego's here. She'll be here. It'll be okay."

 _Man, he IS a kid,_ Shego thought as she dried her hands on one of those towels Dr. D had been so in love with. _And I'm, like, the only thing keeping him from coming apart._

It was the best night's sleep she'd had in about six years.

* * *

When the sun finally did filter slowly through the blinds the next morning, Shego peeked in to check on Drakken, hoping he'd still be sleeping so she could have a few more hours to herself.

Tough to tell at first. Drakken had tossed himself haphazardly onto the bed, half under the covers and half on top, one arm lolling over to the side to almost scrape the floor. His face was puffed into a tear-stiff ball, but - yeah, those eyes were open above the stains that dragged down his cheeks like he'd been using his mommy's mascara for war paint.

With the swamp color gone and the lips cracked but steady, he looked. . . ehh, about as healthy as a blue-skinned guy was gonna look. And soft. Nobody would ever guess he was a supervillain at this point.

That could work to their advantage.

Once Drakken saw her standing in the doorway, his dampened 'do sprang up into its usual spikes. "Shego!" he croaked. Pitifully.

"Last time I checked," Shego replied. She felt kinder after a Drakken-free night and she crossed over, squatting next to him on the bed. "You doing any better?"

"I'm better," Drakken said. "I'm empty."

 _Oh, gross me RIGHT out!_

"Yeah uh-huh great thanks for the info," Shego said without room for punctuation. Hego would have been wagging a warning at her about "tone," but she didn't think she'd slipped into sass yet.

Drakken struggled to perch his odds-and-ends proportions up on one elbow. Sometime between puke-runs, he'd remembered to change into a pair of light blue pajamas with kid-buttons up the chest. At least the guy didn't sleep _au naturale_. "I thought you would like an update on my condition," he said, the snap back in his voice.

"I'm not your nurse, Doc! Keep your bodily functions to yourself."

Yup, _there_ was the sass.

To Shego's surprise, all the definition seemed to fall from Drakken's muscles, which were already two sizes punier out of the lab coat. "Oh," he muttered. "Sorry."

 _So_ not the reaction she was expecting. And, man, was it a relief! Sure, Drakken was trying to glower at her now, but his glowers had always been about as scary as Eeyore's. The threat was dull and shoved in only out of obligation.

He was going to let it pass.

And, yeesh, what would be so important to Drakken that he'd let his man-cub pride take a hit? This guy needed a sidekick even worse than she needed a job. Probably had something to do with that thing in his eyes he was trying to kill.

Whatever. She wasn't a shrink. Long as her job was secure, he could have all the issues he wanted.

Drakken rested a constantly-fidgety hand on his stomach. "My insides still feel molten."

 _Not a real quick learner, is he?_

Then again - it could have been worse.

"I think the worst of it's over, though," Shego said, steering him away from any more graphic descriptions just in case Drakken really didn't get the point unless you clubbed it into his skull with a cast-iron skillet. "Think of it this way: If it hasn't killed you yet, it's not gonna."

That actually seemed to help. Drakken's knees stopped shaking beneath the sheets, and he gave Shego the single most delicate smile she'd seen on a person. Kinda not so bad having the power to stir that up.

Drakken suddenly took such a meticulous interest in brushing the dust bunnies off the blanket, Shego knew the little slob had to be embarrassed. "I've been doing some thinking, Shego. And I've decided my plan needs some . . how shall we put it?. . . readjusting."

 _At least your choice in dining establishments does._

"I've developed a new philosophy!" Drakken gave the air such a weak jab Shego was surprised the air didn't win. "Remember how my old one was, 'Never build what you can steal'?"

"Yup." Shego gave the blankets under him a hard pull, and for once Drakken caught on, leaping from the bed as if he had a spring in his rear.

Two seconds later, he was slumped over double on the ground, gurgling out some sort of moan. Well, what did he expect after spending the whole night throwing up, to be in Superman condition? The way the dude acted, you would've thought his body had a fifty-year warranty.

Shego stuck an exasperated hand down. "Do you need any - "

"No!" Drakken barked, more than a bit too quickly. He scooted away, back to her, so that all Shego could see was the blotching on his neck. "I can get up myself!"

He did, with the standard amount of gasps and Drakken-grunts and a scramble to protect what was left of that pride. Finally he leaned against the wall, probably going for an ultra-casual air. But, _come on_ \- anyone with their eyes in forward could see that he was just propping himself up so he wouldn't go splat again.

Even as far as Shego's were rolled back, he was still pretty transparent.

"My new motto is this: Never steal what you can pretend you already have," Drakken said. "And I can pretend to have the big guns!" He flexed both the lumps of string that passed as biceps.

"Yup," Shego muttered to herself. "In more ways than one."

"So. . . we can go home and regroup?" The question mark Shego could hear matched the expectant one twisting Drakken's face as he peered at her.

Yikes, she _did_ have a lot of pull with this guy.

"Sounds fine to me," Shego said. Hey, anything that got Dr. D to rethink those how-does-this-even-make-sense plans of his.

On her divot back to her room, Shego stopped and squeezed the shoulders of the lab coat lying lifeless in front of the TV. Foam squished between her fingers.

Yup. Just like she'd thought. Padded.

* * *

They checked out at nine A.M. sharp, after Shego had had the chance to shower while Drakken watched The Discovery Channel and Drakken had had a chance to shower while Shego did her hair. Drakken rode the elevator with those shoulder pads rolled back and presented the room keys to the counter girl as if he were entrusting her with the Holy Grail.

"Was your stay enjoyable?" the clerk asked.

Shego closed her eyes, but she still _heard_ Drakken shudder. _Ugh. Why doesn't he just hawk a loogey into the flower arrangement while he's at it?_

She chopped herself between her clueless employer and the obviously-working-not-to-be-offended clerk, laying an everything-will-be-fine-ma'am hand on the counter. Hego had taught her _one_ thing that had worked. What was that theory about monkeys banging on typewriters being able to spell an actual word every now and then?

"Everything was perfectly fine with our rooms," Shego said as Drakken tried to jostle into the front again. "This one just got a little case of food poisoning last night."

The clerk's silver-shadowed eyelids drooped in sympathy. "Oh, you poor thing. Are you feeling any better?" she asked, extending an arm toward Drakken.

Go figure that.

That, and what happened next.

Drakken's pupils shrank. He turned a shade that made the war paint look like it was layered on, thick as mud, and took two steps backward onto Shego's foot, grinding her toes into the rug. That thing packed some major heft for being that small.

Shego knocked him aside so the clerk wouldn't notice his livid-eyed fear. "Much better now, thanks for asking," she got out, forcing the reply out as tightly as her foot was being smashed. She jerked a glare back to beam Drakken, _This is called etiquette. It HELPS sometimes._

Drakken nodded - about twenty times - and followed Shego out the front door, tagging as close to her as he could without wedging in her shoes with her. Anybody watching would have sworn he was less afraid of Shego's plasma than the clerk's bare touch. Maybe because he knew Shego didn't like to light up out in public unless it was absolutely necessary?

Or maybe not.

Maybe more like the sudden flash she had of the third-grade class hamster, the hairball mooch who wasn't picky about who fed him, gave him water, or changed his bedding, but made it totally clear he only really liked that goody-goody Erica Carr.

Shego put that power - and her practice at smoothing her words to stainless steel - to the first test when they reached the hovercraft. "I'm driving," she announced.

Yep. Effective. Drakken scowled lines into his forehead and gazed around him as if he'd forgotten where he'd stashed his argument. He must not have found any, because he lowered himself one joint at a time to the hovercraft's oh-so-comfy plastic seat.

"I guess that'll be all right," Drakken said, directly up Shego's nostrils.

Gag. Every bug in the area just rolled over and died.

Shego reached into her imitation-alligator purse and pulled out a tiny red tin. "Here. Have a mint. Have two. You've got barf-breath."

Drakken dropped two into his mouth and grinned, which Shego took as a good sign, even if it was a weary version that didn't flaunt his molars. "Yes," he said. "Right. My apologies to your olfactories."

Well, _that_ was new.

They'd flown across five states before Shego realized that she could no longer feel Hego's finger stuck in her backbone.

* * *

Once they got back to the lair, Drakken announced he was going to go catch some rays on the patio. Shego had always meant to ask exactly what kind of evil lair had a sunny patio. Now that Dr. D's toothless side had been revealed, she just might sometime.

Whatever. At least it gave her some space to rearrange the room Drakken had set up for her - where she would spend the time he _wasn't_ squawking for her help. There was a bed, a dresser, a nightstand, all those things, "just in case." It would have been weird if it hadn't been in a whole other wing from the guys' bedrooms, and if Drakken hadn't told her he'd threatened the henchmen with bodily harm if they ever entered without Shego's permission.

So even the class dunce could learn a few new tricks.

Shego tugged the furniture to the center of the room to tighten up Drakken's scattered-everywhere decor, clinked nail polish bottles onto the dresser, and slipped her purse over a chair back. When she was interviewing with some of the glitzier villains, she'd seen some pretty extravagant stuff. Diamond chandeliers, as if crystal were so twenty-grand ago. Chairs upholstered with leather straight off a prime rib. Wallpaper jobs that must have cost more than Hego made in a year.

Dr. D's lair was pretty dumpy in comparison. Clearly, he was trying for blockbuster horror on a straight-to-video budget.

Because it never would have occurred to the guy to steal _money_.

Yeah, she planned to boost his economy something major. Maybe there was a _real_ alligator purse out there with her name on it.

Shego grunted to herself. She'd never been into the whole kill-an-animal-get-a-purse thing, but it was sorta hard to feel sorry for an alligator.

Put some green sheets on the bed, hang a few spare outfits in the closet, and the place would actually start to look like - not _home_. The shark tank directly under her bed really didn't serve as a welcome mat. But like a place that didn't fill her with the urge to stick her finger down her own throat, and that put it WAY above any "home" Team Go had ever had.

Shego ripped off the past like a Band-Aid and stomped through the brief sting to go check on her employer.

The series of doors got warmer and warmer as she closed each one firmly behind her until she was outside. Drakken was sprawled out on the patio, breathing heavily. His face still seemed a little pale, but he was recovering nicely. The sunshine definitely couldn't hurt matters any. From the powdery condition of his skin, it had been ages since he'd gotten out of the lab and into the fresh air.

"Hello, Shego!" Drakken said. Only the gravel shot to his chirp held it out of baby-bird territory. "I feel much better now!" He nodded, rubbing that chin that looked too young to be stroked sage-old-guy style. "I think it's the sunlight. Vitamin D is very instrumental in the healing process, you know."

Okay, she would admit she wasn't a scientist, so sometimes it wasn't easy for her to tell when Drakken was talking real science and when he was just jackin' his jaws. Right now, though, Shego's Gobbledegook Radar was screaming.

But she didn't need to see a tantrum right now. Not when she already towered over his exhausted slouch.

"So," Shego said, "what about the plan?"

Drakken came alive, right out to the end of the folding chair, which his tailbone barely met. "Yes, I've been recalibrating, and I've come to a new conclusion: I shall conquer this nation with the power of" - big drama-pause - "Photoshop!"

Absolutely nothing about that was promising.

"Hear me out, Shego!" Drakken said before Shego had even opened her mouth. He spread his fingers like a pile of twigs and began to tick items off on them. "Step One: I use the pictures I have of the nastiest superweapons on the planet, and I crop myself in so it looks like I already have them!"

Shego couldn't resist saying, "You don't crop things _in_ , Dr. D. You crop them _out_."

"Yes - well - be that as it may!" Drakken balled up a fist and stared at it, still every bit the baby bird with the spiky feathers. Finally, he seemed to remember how to count and moved on to the next finger. "Step Two: I'm still holding the paintings in the Smithsonian for ransom! The nation's greatest leaders will comply with my demands or have their artistic heritage erased forever! And since no one knows yet that I've acquired a sidekick, they won't come looking for you."

That evil glimmer was back in the eyes that didn't look like they were staring down headlights anymore, and the lingering smell of Altoids gave him something cooler, smoother. From the right angle, Shego could _actually_ picture him conquering the world.

She guided a rare thrill down to her soul. "Yeah," Shego said. "You could even suggest you had some help from the inside. Maybe get somebody fired."

Drakken's grin nearly crowded Shego right off the patio. "Ah, I love that nasty brain of yours!" he said.

For half a second, Shego's sarcasm melted. He _wasn't_ Hego. He appreciated that about her.

"Don't you like it out here?" Drakken said. "It's a great spot to watch the sun set. When you're not too busy, of course."

 _Sunsets. Why am I not surprised?_

"And to think." He yawned and stretched his arms out to their full lanky length. "It's perfectly lovely to come out here and think."

It also would have been a picture-perfect op for Shego to say, _What, you mean you DO that?_ , but she screened it off. Wouldn't get her any closer to getting the gleam back.

"So I've been thinking," Drakken said. "And don't get a big head over this or anything - but you were pretty smart not to eat at that Mexican place."

 _Right. Because you've got the egotistical market cornered._

Drakken did come off the chair then, tripping over one of the legs on his way up. "Don't you see, Shego?" he crowed as he jerked himself back upright. "Your brilliance perfectly complements my brilliance! If there's anything I don't know, you'll know, and verse visa!"

"Vice versa."

"Exactly my point!" Drakken scrubbed his hands together until Shego thought he'd rip right through his gloves. "Oh, we can't fail now! Together, we are unbeatable!"

His voice was winding up into a rant, his back straightening out of its hunch. His eyes searching for her input even through that cocky glint that faked not needing it.

And Shego knew she'd found the place where she belonged.

"Oooh, here! Come here!" Drakken reached into his pocket and emerged with his relatively-new-but-bruised cell phone. There wasn't any time for a dry reply before he'd scooped his arm around her shoulder and pressed her into a square the phone could capture. "I want a picture to commemorate this moment."

Yeah, well, he was just lucky she had something to "commemorate," too, or he would have gotten an armpit of plasma. Shego let the phone snap once and then ducked out his reach.

As far as bosses went, though. . . she could do a lot worse. Dr. D was amusing. And bad-intentioned. And not as stupid as he acted. And disgustingly trusting.

The potential in that last part made the deal even sweeter. Not that was she planning to bump the Doc off in his sleep or anything. _I mean, gross, right?_

Nah, Drakken was a fun little guy. She'd stick around and help him out. But. hey, it was eat-or-be-eaten in the villain circle when you got right down to it.

Shego thought she might be able to sympathize with those alligators after all.

 **~So why _is_ Shego so. . . the way she is? We might find out a little more - next time. ;)~**


	4. The Go-ing Gets Tough

**~Hi, everyone! :D After about five years, I finally managed to come up with a backstory that I think might to our friend Shego some justice. This is the first part - the other three will be interspersed with the rest of the chappies. Hope ya like.~**

Batman: Remember, you're a hero.  
Magma: No. I'm an accident. Real heroes, they make a choice. I never did.  
-Batman Beyond

The dress was perfect.

Shego wasn't a dress person as a general rule, but - geez, even _she_ wouldn't dream of showing up at prom in her fave T-shirt and hang-around slacks.

Or the jumpsuit. She'd get laughed out of the eleventh grade for that.

This dress, though - that would kill the cheer squad's subtle snickers, right there in their throats. Neckline that scooped just high enough to be Hego-not-riding-her-tail tasteful. Skirt tickling just below the knees. Waist laced with sparkle that was anything but dainty.

A kick-butt dress. And it fit like it was made-to-order, too.

The only thing that wasn't perfect about it was the price tag.

Shego's stomach sunk and then pulled tight as a trigger when she stared at the number on the bottom. Natch. As soon as it looked like she might actually _get_ something she wanted, it had to be tossed out of her reach.

She jogged the rest of the way home. Snagging the collar of Hego's I-just-got-off-work polo, Shego planted her brother in her living room and poured out the problem, even trying for that whole positive attitude that he was always obsessing over. But two sentences into it, Hego was squeezing the life out of the bridge of his nose like a middle-aged parent, and Shego knew the nays were going to have it.

Sure enough, Hego's eyes saddened. "Shego -" he began.

Shego didn't wait to hear the actual _no_. "Why not?" she demanded.

Hego moved on to that stretch-your-eyelids-with-your-thumbs thing that Shego recognized as Step Two. "Shego, finances have been very tight this month. We didn't have as much set aside as I thought we did."

His voice was just as level as that woman's on TV while she told you her drug could, "in rare cases," cause fatal heart attacks. Like, hello? That's not the sort of thing you stay calm about!

Shego snorted through the grit of her teeth. "So you have enough money for Mego's orthodontist appointments, but not enough for me to have a dress?" She directed that last comment at her _beloved_ next-oldest brother, who was lounging on the couch, running a hand over his head-with-the-bangs-too-long and probably practicing pickup lines inside it. He put the "ego" in "Mego."

"Mego's braces are a health need," Hego said, pulling up to his full muscular height. "It's not at all the same thing as a dress for some little dance."

It had been ages since any villain had landed a roundhouse kick to Shego's face, but she instantly remembered how it shook your jaw out of place.

"This isn't 'some little dance,' Hego! If it were 'some little dance,' I wouldn't even be asking!" Shego's ears recoiled at her own screech. She sounded like a kitten whose tail was being tied into a bow, but - man ALIVE, if the big dope had any clue how many little dances she'd sat out on without breathing a WORD to him. Sadie Hawkins, Valentine's Banquet - "We're talking about prom!"

Shego hitched herself back just in time to keep from stomping her foot and crying out, _Don't DO this! You're not gonna make this seem smaller than it is! You're not gonna shame me for something I'm not doing. You're NOT._ Still, just the fact that she'd even _considered_ it disgusted her, and she sorta wished some supervillain would swoop down and attack the come-and-bomb-us Go Tower.

When she was talking to them, she'd perfected the art of wrapping _I-can't-believe-I'm-even-wasting-my-powers-on-you_ around her words like barbed wire. Put her in the same room with her brothers, though, and she was suddenly all screaming, spitting Freak-O Cat.

The deep blue stare behind Hego's geeky glasses was sickeningly gentle. "I didn't even know you'd been asked," he said softly.

"That's the whole _point_ , dinkus!" Shego flipped her hair back so it wouldn't look for one second like she was taking shelter behind it, doing a deliberate back-turn on the part where Hego wouldn't let guys come within five feet of her. "If I don't go, everybody's gonna think that I'm a social outcast - that I don't have a date, so I'm too scared to come!"

"But you _are_ a social outcast," Mego piped up from the sofa. "And you _don't_ have a date."

Shego turned what she knew was the wrath steaming from her eyes full-force on him. "'Preciate it, bro," she snapped.

He gave her the smug look that would've ordinarily been accompanied with a grin - if he hadn't been so self-conscious about his new mouthful of wires and bands.

The idea of ripping them out was even more appealing because, for once, the creep was right. It was Tessa and Tanya and Pammy - all those girls so much alike they coulda been cooked up in a lab - the ones who "gag me with a spoon"ed everything they put on their Weird List. Missing two weeks of school only to show back up sparking plasma and sporting a new green tinge was the kind of thing that shot you right to the top. They never burned you to your face, just in whispers that stopped abruptly when you came down the hallway.

Shego could've broken them all over one knee if she'd wanted to, and she _had_ been able to shut them up with plasma a few times. But of _course_ the second she'd pounced, a teacher would appear, doing everything but swinging a whip - or bothering to listen to Shego's side of the story. She'd gotten the "now, Shego, I know you're still traumatized from the. . .incident. . . a few years ago, but that's no excuse to treat other people that way" so many times she could recite it right along with them.

Mr. Goody Two-Shoes wouldn't understand that. He'd never been called to the principal's office except to be made School Crossing Guard. His light skin and blue-black loop of hair were within normal-human boundaries. Some of the girls even thought it made him - _gag me with a FORKLIFT!_ \- hunky.

But maybe Hego had enough life goin' on upstairs to grasp onto _some_ thing.

"I'd get a chance to hang out with other _girls_ ," Shego tried saying. She glared around the house that smelled like male-sweat and little brothers who still missed the toilet seat half the time. "You're the one who's always saying I need to find some friends, aren't you?"

"Now, Shego." Hego's eyebrows were settling in for a lecture. "You know you can't buy friends with a new dress."

Was. He. For. REAL?

"I know that!" Shego didn't care about her pitch anymore, not when it was all she could do not to blast an acidic hole right through the living room wall. "That's not what it's about! I just want what they have!"

True. She didn't wanna be part of that circle - _come on, with friends like that, who needs arch-foes?_ She just thought she didn't deserve to have them throwing knives in her back between classes.

"Money?" Hego looked down at her with disapproval you could have chopped with an ax blade, and Shego hiked her chin to the challenge.

"No! Not money! Being normal teenagers! I just want to be able to go to a dance and hang out and do things and be a normal girl for once!"

Freak-O Cat was dive-bombing between every word.

Hego's frown quivered at the edges, and he tipped forward to cup Shego's slicing chin, but she jerked away. "But you're _not_ normal," he said. "You're part of Team Go."

 _Yeah. Right. Gee, thanks for the reminder. Because today just wasn't swell enough already._

Speaking of Team Go. . .

"You know, this whole thing could be moot if we'd ever just charged money for taking down the bad guys," Shego heard herself snarl. "Now, who decided not to do that again?"

Hego stiffened into a wall. "Asking to be compensated for doing our civic duty is not a heroic attitude."

Shego could feel her lip furling back out of sheer reflex. Too much stupid all up in her face. "Who cares? We're people, too. Even police and firefighters get paid."

"This isn't the same thing," Hego replied vacantly.

"Darn right it isn't. We _need_ it more." Shego propped her arms across her front. "Okay, but sometimes, the 'citizens of this fair city' -" she rumbled her voice low and stupid like Hego's - "are actually grateful, and they want to give us a reward. How is THAT not okay?"

"We can't accept it," Hego said, as mechanically as a robot programmed with nothing but after-school-special answers.

Shego forced her voice to a seething low. "That's funny, 'cuz last time I checked, 'we' was plural. Why do _you_ always decide what we 'can' and 'can't' do?"

Hego took in air until Shego thought his buttons would pop from the strain of his chest. That _look_ came into his eyes, too. "Because I was the one who - "

"Don't say it!" Shego spat. She balled up a fist and shoved it in her brother's direction. "Don't say it, or so help me I _will_ punch you in the schnoz!"

Hego stepped back a few inches. Nobody could say THAT wasn't gratifying, at least. His eyes drooped again, completing the Marmaduke air. "It wouldn't be fair to the citizens of Go City to imply that we're doing this for the money."

"Yeah? How about the mayor? The mayor himself? We saved his skin once, but of course we can't get paid for it! That would mean we allowed ourselves to be rewarded, and wouldn't that be calamitous?"

Hego stared down at her, and Shego didn't believe for one second that he was still trying to wrap his brain around "calamitous." Yeah, he usually got lost with words over two syllables - unless it was something snooty and self-righteous. Those he picked up on right away.

Sure enough, a shade of indignation passed over Hego, and Shego groaned inside. Great. She was about to receive another lecture on Truth, Justice, and The American Way.

When had those _ever_ been a part of her life?

"A true superhero rushes to save those in danger, no matter the risk, with no thought of himself!" Hego said.

 _Right. Good luck finding people like_ that _in the real world._

"Well, as nice as that sounds," Shego said, "money isn't the kinda thing you can just swear off." She pictured Hego with the Mathter's hanging, freckled face so she could dismiss his special brand of deluded. "Even the Amish don't do that, because it - doesn't - work."

Hego smiled - that was the closest he ever came to fixing an issue, smiling at it. "Cheer up. We aren't starving or anything. I've got a job now - "

"You work at Bueno Nacho!"

"There's a lot of room to move up, though." Hego didn't budge one upbeat bit. "I could even be manager someday!"

Shego made an almost-involuntary noise of disgust. Maybe Hego was okay with a future overseeing bendy straws and greasy burritos, but she had some bigger dreams of her own. And they sure as heck weren't comin' true around _here_.

Hego went into that attempt-at-sternness that probably didn't even scare away that squirrels that begged for scraps at the Bueno Nacho windows. " _You_ could get a job," he said.

"I've _got_ a job!" Shego cried. "I bust bad guy tail left and right, keeping Go City safe, and I can't even get a dress for freakin' prom!"

She hurled that at him so violently even _Hego_ couldn't have missed it. Actually, beating the snot out of a supervillain - as in _pronto_ \- was sounding more and more appealing. Of course Electronique always blacked out the town during the middle of the SAT, but she couldn't make an appearance _now_?

Hego backed up a few more steps, shoulders pulling together with hurt.

But it didn't take him long to get the next platitude locked and loaded. "You know, Shego, you're a valuable asset to the team."

 _If by "valuable asset," you mean "the only reason any of us are still alive," then - yeah, I guess so._

"So what?" The words scorched Shego's lips as they lurched out like they had a life of their own. "We do all that work - and for what? We stop the bad guys, they go to jail, they break out, and lather, rinse, repeat."

"She's got a point," Mego chimed in.

Hego put up the hand he hadn't figured out yet was useless. "What are you saying here, Shego?"

"I'm saying," Shego said, fists drawn in against the _let-'er-rip_ literally itching at her fingertips, "if we were getting paid to bring them down every time, that'd be one thing. But since we're not getting anything out of it - and since they don't ever even stay in jail long enough to actually get punished - why don't we just blow them up already?"

The room fell so quiet Shego could hear cicadas wailing outside.

"Shego!" Hego's bark had actually found, like, a half-teaspoon of authority. Mego jerked into a lanky pole, knobby chicken-elbows about to take flight.

Of course. She shoulda known better. That was one of the other things that made Team Go the lamest bunch of losers to ever luck their way into superpowers: they were all too "gentlemanly" to punch one of the female villains, even if she was coming after them with a machete or whatever stupid death weapons were "in" this week. So, yeah, it was a given that they'd rather sacrifice every scrap of convenience and comfort in their lives than even _consider_ eliminating the problem.

Now they wanted her to sacrifice _hers_? _Putting the odds of that somewhere below zero._

"It would fix so much," Shego said.

Hego graduated to massaging the cheeks, a move Shego recognized from all the times supervillains hadn't surrendered at his first command. She coulda sworn he'd cry any second now. "Shego" - his whisper was raspy - "what would Mom and Dad think, hearing you talk like that?"

Shego was hit by a brief, intense pinch of pain that she wanted to claw out of her own chest. "Who knows? Why should I care?"

"Because once they get better, they'll come back here, and we'll all be a family again." Hego glanced over his shoulder at Mego, who didn't even seem to be breathing anymore. "Don't you two want them to be proud of you?"

 _Oh, no, he_ didn't.

Shego could feel her nostrils quivering, her temperature climbing to fire-alarm heights. There was nothing left inside to keep her from slamming back, "News flash, Big Blue. Mom and Dad AREN'T getting better. Do the words 'early onslaught dementia' mean anything to you?"

Hego looked at her as if she'd just dumped a bowl of hot sauce on his head.

 _Yeah, you and me both, pal._ Shego was sure some of that same crud was dribbling down her backbone.

Hego cleared his throat in that _I-am-greatly-important_ way. "Now, Sis, I'm no doctor. . ."

"No kidding? You need _brains_ to be a doctor!" Shego snapped, and watched the martyrdom wash over her brother's face. Give him a fake skull, and he'd be Hamlet.

Mego was still, from what Shego could tell, rediscovering how to breathe. Normally, that'd get a guaranteed laugh from him.

Would've taken Mr. Nobility down a few pegs. Instead, Hego was still all puffed-out when he said, "But the _actual_ doctors are optimistic. They believe that someday - hopefully someday soon - Mom and Dad will be back to normal. As long as they take the proper precautions, the doctors see no reason to believe they can't regain their health."

Shego blinked. _Reporting toxic levels of denial here, Sarge. What am I supposed to do with it?_

When she was six, she might've believed him. When she was ten, she might've felt sorry enough for him to play along.

 _Ya know, back when I could hang out in the treehouse without worrying about space debris._

Still electrified with shots of plasma-level rage, Shego heard more than felt the stony sound that scuffed in her throat. "Um, yeah, hi. Did you miss the part where those 'proper procedures' include _not seeing us_? Like, maybe ever again?"

Hego flinched as if she'd thrown a handful of starch in his face. Okay, good. She'd made him look stupid - not an unmanageable task, but it was still a victory.

Until Shego noticed that his goopy gaze was aiming behind her and tearing up. She traced it back to two tiny figures standing in the doorway, looking like they'd just found out Santa was a fake.

And Shego felt like she'd been the one to yank off the phony beard.

"Mom and Dad _are_ gonna get better, right?" one of the twins asked in a voice still a good couple years away from puberty.

The Wegos' eyes - those weird red-brown eyes than woulda been demonic on kids any less cute - were penny-round behind those stupid black masks Hego made them all wear. The innocence that seemed to leap out of their haven't-seen-a-zit-yet skin was frozen, preparing to shatter.

For pretty much the first time since she'd started kindergarten, Shego was speechless. She didn't want to give her little brothers the same lies and platitudes she'd been fed her whole life. They deserved better than that.

But how exactly did telling the truth, bringing down the hammer, and shattering their world as they knew it qualify as "better"?

Yep, she was wishing some major pain on Hego right about now.

With nothing more than an "uh-oh," Mego shrank down until he was almost impossible to see. For once Shego didn't blame the creep, even if squishing him under her boot would've gotten rid of about half her problems.

"Of course Mom and Dad are gonna get better," Hego said. The words were oozing out with so much desperation, Shego instantly vowed no one would EVER catch _her_ begging that way. "They'll get cured and come back to live with us. We'll be a family again - "

"And then we'll defeat all the big bad guys and live happily ever after, right?" Shego said. Okay, so she sorta hated herself for a minute, but - _oh my GOSH_ , did the guy never give it a _rest_?

"Now, Shego, come on. Don't talk like that," Hego said without a scolding in earshot. His entire face was one huge, clumsy apology. As if it weren't bad enough living with a dumb-as-a-stump, holier-than-thou big brother, of course the guy had to actually _care_.

"Ooooh." That was Mego, who had popped back up to full size at Shego's elbow, wearing his new close-lipped smirk, though for who was anybody's guess. He grabbed his hips in that pose that he thought made him look super-tough. Yeah, right. His elbows just looked even more like they belonged on a two-for-one special down at the fried chicken place.

Shego ignored him, which was only possible by punching up a forearm to block him from view. "Aviarius and those guys get whatever they want. We get nothing, and you know why? It's because we have rules and they don't!"

"Shego. . ." Hego said. Helplessly. As if he were running low on feel-good phrases. Or - _heaven forbid_ \- he'd realized they weren't doing anyone a lick of good.

He crossed toward her, holding out those big panda-arms that thought they could solve it. Shego wrenched her body away from him and held it at a stabbing angle. "Don't touch me," she barked.

Mego took that as his cue to "Oooh" again. Shego still didn't know who he was taunting, and at this point - she was _so_ beyond caring.

"Shut it up, Zipper-Lips!" Shego said. It wasn't her most creative insult - give her some time and some frost, and she could've _really_ burned the kid - but hopefully it'd remind him that Micro-Mego was the height that fit him best.

Shego didn't glance back to see if it'd hit the target. She stormed down the hall, closed the door at the closest thing to a slam she could get away with, kicked her backpack away, and burrowed into her pillow, hissing.

Her eyes smoldered, but not with tears. She hadn't cried in - what? Going on five years? - and she wasn't about to start now. It was more the concentrated effort of willing Hego to step out the front door and straight into a swarm of bees.

 _Seriously, Shego. Get it together._

How was she supposed to not go crazy, though? Hego assumed she was being selfish, that it was all about the dress, and it _wasn't_.

It was about having one night where her life wasn't a giant green flame, the way it had been ever since she'd woken up in the rubble of the treehouse with hands she couldn't switch off.

Discovering her brothers had superpowers now, too. The house nearly being leveled by glowing rainbow shards. Government agents showing up, whispering about the radiation from the comet affecting adults differently than it did kids - raking one of them with her new glow had been the only semi-decent memory Shego had of the whole thing. More and more and more of them appearing, driving a gross black truck whose skull-and-crossbones logo opened a sinkhole in your stomach.

More whispered conversations about _what to do with the children_ \- as if "the children" couldn't HEAR that they might be split up or handed over for the feds to experiment on. Speculation on whether "the parents," even when they recovered, would be able to handle "further exposure" to those kids. Hego, eighteen just in the nick of time, swooping in to keep the family together - and never letting any of them forget it.

 _Don't good guys have some kind of rules against torture?_ Shego wondered.

Because having to listen to an _if-it-weren't-for-me-you'd-be-in-a-foster-home-or-worse_ spiel every time she wasn't as unnaturally sacrificial as Hego was right up there with getting her toes chopped off, one by one.

And the constant references to "Mom and Dad." Names that would never affect her life in any way - he might as well have cited Al and Tipper Gore for all they meant to Shego. Besides, listening to how Hego talked, she'd always gotten the impression they'd just be two more people who didn't understand her.

Sometimes, Shego thought she might prefer a foster home, where no one would give a rip because she wasn't their kid. Where she wouldn't have to live up to anybody's sweet-baby-sister expectations. At least in a foster home, who'd stop her from sneaking out at night and spray-painting a freeway sign? From being _normal_?

But noooooo. Hego had to protect her from the little taggers and the druggies and all those other lowlifes whose clocks she could've cleaned even BEFORE she'd gotten her powers fully under control. And, 'kay, Shego would admit she wasn't gonna do anything that would spoil her chances of getting into a decent college, becoming a teacher, and escaping from the self-proclaimed archangel of Go City.

 _College_. Shego slowly lifted her face from the pillow.

Of _course_ \- her college fund. First thing Hego'd done after he'd gotten guardianship - _rah-rah, Hego, our hero_ \- was set up an account for each of his four younger siblings. None of them were supposed to touch it until they turned eighteen.

 _Riiiiiiiight. And I'm gonna be elected Prom Queen this year._

At least she'd get to _go_ , though. Hego was as brain-shredded about checking the accounts as he was with everything else. He wouldn't miss less than a hundred for a dress.

Shego rolled over onto her back and crooked a smile at the ceiling. She'd just tell him it got marked down, and he wouldn't suspect a thing. Perfect.

Especially since if she didn't break one of Hego's rules soon, she was going to hurl.

 **~And of course Hego's line about being "not normal" was taken from Mr. Dr. P's quote in _Team Impossible_. I really wanted to stress the point that Hego's not a _mean_ clueless jerk. . . . he just cannot understand Shego. Like, at all. :( ~**


	5. Vicious and Bloodthirsty

**~Thanks to everyone who reviewed. Buba, I very much agree that the Shego we meet on the series is more the daughter who's in it for the money and doesn't come home because no one approves of her job. It's just that most of us start out vulnerable, even if we don't stay that way. I wanted to capture Shego at a point where she still was. Does that make any sense?~**

The lair right next to the volcano has already been sold.

Shego was okay with that - volcanoes _can_ be somewhat temperamental - but Dr. Drakken would be fibbing if he said he wasn't disappointed. Months and months ago, he envisioned dropping Kim Possible to the fiery magma of her certain doom. Letting her burn in lava would've been the perfect way to fulfill the dream the little redheaded brat had kicked away from him in Wisconsin.

(Lava and magma are actually the same substance, magma just called lava when it emerges from its cocoon under the Earth's crust, Drakken remembers. _Oooh_ , the natural world is so wondrous!)

Yes, well, that clearly was not happening now. The lair went to the highest bidder, who was definitely not Drakken. Finances have been tight for the past year or so, and the bills are starting to pile up in a fashion all too similar to when Mother had to switch over and become the family's breadwinner. (A strange phrase, because it makes it sound like she was gambling for baked goods. . . )

This plan, however, is going to be the next best thing. Drakken's repaired his shrink ray, the one that malfunctioned into a grow ray because he forgot to - errrr, that is, because Commodore Puddles wasn't let out. That's why he's also taken Commodore Puddles outside at ten-minute intervals that are very responsible, even if his puppy does spend most of them sniffing around and chasing seagulls.

Then, once Kim Possible is shrunk, he'll drop her in his vintage-'80s lava lamp. It's not real lava - because real lava wouldn't be dark blue with green floops in it - but it still has a DO NOT TOUCH GLASS WHILE PLUGGED IN warning on it, so it must reach very high temperatures. Should be perfectly suited for frying Kim Possible up like a worm on a ninety-degree sidewalk.

Drakken makes a face. He kind of wishes he hadn't just given himself that mental image.

"This plan cannot fail, Shego!" he announces to his sidekick.

"Wish I'd kept a tally on how many times I've heard _that_ ," Shego says. Her sarcastic artillery has been polished clean to fire, and Drakken's mid-afternoon snack of apple slices and cheese squirms inside him.

He locks his wrists on his hips, determined to fight this one out to the bitter end. "Yes, but this time, it's _official_!"

"Official _how_?" Shego's eyebrow - well, one of her two - tweaks the slightest fraction upward. "Do you have a certificate or something?"

"Uhhhng. . . no," Drakken admits. "But I can get one!" he adds quickly, doing his best to keep his pitch from climbing with his volume. "See, there's this place on the Internet where you can print - "

"No. No, Dr. D," Shego interrupts him, quite impolitely. "You can't certify your _self_."

There she goes again. Knowing all the unspoken rules of the universe. Or maybe, maybe - Drakken gropes around in his brain's file cabinet, under _L_ for _lifeline_ \- maybe she's just inventing them as she goes along!

"Says who?" Drakken demands. "Doesn't it say you can on all those boxes of breakfast energy bars?"

Shego's snort reverberates through the entire lair, until even the walls of his beautifully ominous surroundings seem to be mocking him. "No, that's _fortify_ yourself."

Ah. Yes. Right. It is.

Drat! How does she do this? It's statistically improbable for one person to be correct this blasted often!

Drakken turns his back to her. "Fine, then! I am incredibly certain - no, ninety-nine-point-nine-percent certain - that this plan cannot fail!" The words feel shrill coming out of his throat, but if they sound that way hitting the air, Shego doesn't notice for once.

"Hey, I'd love to be wrong," Shego says.

 _Liar, liar, jumpsuit-on-fire._

But he'll not be mired down in her cynicism today. Drakken aims his shrink ray at the door and positions his lava lamp to create a Pythagorean-perfect right triangle. "Kim Possible shall taste my wrath today!" he says. "Oooh, she'll be a perfectly poached Possible!"

When he twists a look back over his shoulder to see if Shego caught the awesome alliteration he just made (and _awesome alliteration_ is another one!), he finds her mouth twitching the barest minimum twitches. Although Drakken's never known whether that's a taunt or genuine appreciation for his wit - hey, at least she's enjoying herself.

"A perfectly poached princess Possible," Drakken repeats, only it's not a _direct_ repeat because this time he inserted one of Shego's favorite nicknames for their nemesis. It's got to be an insult, because Shego hates Kim Possible with every fiber of her very fibrous being, but Drakken's never seen how being a princess could be anything bad.

Unless you were Princess of the Prairie Dogs or something. That'd be a rather dubious honor. . .

"And she'll be a goner," Shego says. It sounds so meaningless in her unflavored voice. Drakken's not sure whether or not he likes that.

He wants Kim Possible dead as much as she does ( _she_ referring to Shego, not Princess Prairie Dog herself), but. . . _yeesh_. Can she not get _excited_ about it? Why must he be alone in his exuberance?

The thought shoots away from Drakken like those little silverfish bugs slipping through your fingers when you try to catch them. He boings from foot to foot and clicks his heels together the way Dorothy does to jet-propel herself home. (Had to be jet-propulsion. Magic is just too contrived, not to mention impossible.)

His shrink ray towers above him, menacing and deadly and a rather pleasant shade of lavender. Its energy arms sprout from the front, stretching down into precisely honed points that are waiting to spark, much the same as Drakken's own vigor begs to be released. He hugs the bulky side and strokes the protective panel over the wiring as tenderly as he would scratch behind his poodle's ears.

"All we need to do now," Drakken murmurs to it and himself and Shego, "is wait for her to show up."

Long silence. _Very_ long silence.

"Any minute now," Drakken says, impatient tingles in his feet.

Two minutes tick by so slowly, the hands on his watch have to be weighted with quick-drying cement.

"Any _second_ now!" Drakken taps the glass over his watch-face in the hopes of jarring the cement loose and points a Commanding Finger at the door.

The door disobeys him by not opening up and relinquishing Kim Possible. Doesn't it just figure, on the occasion he's actually ready for her to make an entrance. . . mhhg, ghhk, neee?

Drakken pulls a furious hand through his hair, surveying his preparations. Shrink ray? Check. Lava lamp? Check. Both plugged in and ready to rumble? Check.

Sidekick support? Ehhh. . . mostly check.

Well, he might as well go to the bathroom while he has some spare time, just so he won't be overwhelmed by any urgency in the middle of his villainous apex. A mad scientist has to be as comfortable as he can to destroy his arch-foe, after all.

"I'm taking a restroom run," Drakken calls back to Shego as he heads down the hall. "Rather ironic - I was so focused on Commodore Puddles's bladder that I forgot about my own."

Shego's black upper lip rolls back until her gums are visible. They're the only pink, vulnerable part of her Drakken's ever seen. "Please do not _ever_ say the word 'bladder' to me again."

Drakken tries to store that advice away for future use, but then a huge mental cyclone barrels through and snatches it up and spirals it around with forgotten chunks of other debris from months and decades ago. . .

Whatever. Focusing on the plan. Restroom first, though.

It doesn't take long. While Drakken washes his hands, he gives his reflection a clinical examination. As disconcerting as the blueness and the scar were when he first got them - two different instances - they're fast becoming his new normal. They're as much pieces of the evil-genius garb as the lab coat is.

The scar, especially, Drakken's grown to love. It makes him look tough, like an outlaw, a bandit, a violent criminal. It testifies that he's known pain, severe pain, and he's only come out of it stronger.

Without revealing that he cried his eyes raw in the emergency room.

Drakken smooths down his eyebrow with his pinkie finger - which, despite the name, is of course as blue as the rest of his skin. Except for _his_ gumline, which has somehow stayed a nice healthy (if a bit pale) gum color. Maybe to make up for the constant, just-been-punched black covering his eyelids.

Anyway. Smoothing down eyebrow.

There! Drakken hums his satisfaction to the tune of "On Top of Old Smoky." Now he looks presentable _and_ terrifying, both the components he needs to complete his mission, to defy - nay, destroy! - the opposition.

The opposition here being represented by a skinny little pep ralley of a person and her strange buffoonish friend with the pants problem and the extremely forgettable name.

Actually, the blond kid isn't all that bad. Certainly would be no threat by himself. Maybe - Drakken considers this as his reflection's forehead writhes - maybe he could spare the buffoon.

 _What_? And spoil his reputation as a bloodthirsty megavillain that he's worked so hard for all these decades? The one he's long gotten - did get - will be getting any day now?

No. Drakken slaps both palms down on the sink. No, there can be no mercy. Kim Possible and her little buddy have got to believe he has teeth behind his threats. Which he _does_ \- lots of them. And, my, my, what big chompers they are, too!

There's a _bzzzzing!_ from somewhere nearby. Drakken stiffens as though he's just been tasered (which he actually has been - once - not an experience he'd recommend), because those are almost exactly the same sounds his shrink ray spritzed out before transmuting into a growth ray. He runs for the door.

Silence from the front hall. Even Shego, as passive as she can be when it comes to the non-battle aspects of his plans, would be yelling for him if a Doomsday device spat sparks in her direction.

Although. . . is a shrink ray a true _Doomsday_ device? It's not designed to kill. Such a machine has loads of potential applications, many of them harmless and some even beneficial to mankind.

Well, he's using it to doom Kim Possible, and that _makes_ it a Doomsday device by default!

The _bzzzzing_ comes again. It's definitely within the bathroom, but it's over before it can crystallize a perfect trail from where it came. ("From whence it came" is such a cool thing to say.)

Drakken frowns and beats _Think - think - think_ in a rhythm on his chin. What is there to even make noise in the bathroom? Toothbrush, toothpaste, toilet. . . none of them _bzzzing_ , not within the reach of Drakken's significant knowledge.

Resting his tongue against his palette, Drakken attempts to imitate the pattern in his throat, to rule himself out. Sometimes he produces noises that he isn't even aware of.

Nope. Not him. He can't replicate a pitch that high. Speaking of cool things to say, a deep voice - such as his own - is referred to in terms of "timbre." Probably because it'd serve a shouting lumberjack well.

All right, he's going to go mad. . . _der_ if he doesn't figure that one out soon.

 _Bzzzzing!_ Again. This time, Drakken pounces on it, traces it back to what is undeniably the source.

It turns out, rather anticlimactically, to be a fly. A fly caught in the strands of a spider web you can't even see unless the glow of three 40-watt bulbs hits it _just so_. Such glorious examples of nature's architecture, those webs! Pretty and graceful and yet proportionately stronger than steel.

Heh. . . that could also describe Shego.

Drakken sits back on his haunches to enjoy the show, sure it'll be as delicious for him as it is for the spider. They're both carnivores at heart, after all.

But then the fly kicks all six of its little legs at once. Deep down inside Drakken, something squirms, and he's already gone to the bathroom, so it can't be _that_.

The fly's compound eyes flicker purple and silver when they capture the light. Drakken catches his own eyes expanding, and he jerks them back down into slits. No. To go soft is to forfeit the world he's been so long denied.

 _It's a fly, Drakken,_ he informs the sentimental part of himself that seems to have let that slip away. _Its brain is so tiny, it's barely conscious. It probably can't feel pain. That "fear" nonsense is just an unsubstantiated rumor perpetuated by animal rights extremists. There are too many of them in the world already! What if they try to overthrow human beings?_

But for some reason that launches the grunts from his clenched jaw, none it sinks below the surface. He's cringing now, anticipating the killing blow.

 _It's a_ fly. _Don't they only live for about twenty-four hours anyway?_

Still. . . what a way to go.

Spiders don't _eat_ you, _per se_. They simply sink their fangs in and draw your blood from your body. Vampires. Why are bats the members of the animal kingdom associated with the mythical bloodsuckers? Even the kind christened "vampire" bats don't employ their fangs to slurp. They just make a cut and lap up what comes out, usually on livestock. Nick and lap, nick and lap, nick and. . .

You know what? He needs to stop thinking about blood. Getting a little light-headed here.

A cookie and some juice are now required.

Drakken strolls casually out to the kitchen and it doesn't take much time to locate a juice box and a Chips Overboard. While he munches and sips, he refills his mind with how much he hates Kim Possible, and not just for being the spawn of James.

She's made such a fool of him, over and over again, and that's something he doesn't need any help with. Foiled _more_ than several foilproof plans, stealing his thunder before it even has the chance to work up one good rumble. Once kicked Shego with enough force to leave a bruise, which Drakken especially vowed never to forgive the little ankle-biter for.

And her mouth is nothing if not a Shego-in-training.

 _Brrr_. Drakken shudders. The prospect of multiple Shegos is. . .

. . . marvelously unnerving! Drakken jolts upward, spine holding steady at 180 degrees, as the idea churns itself to life in his head. If only he could talk Shego out of her ridiculous clone-o-phobia, Kim Possible wouldn't know where to begin. Together, he and Shego and Shego and Shego and Shego and Shego would be unbeatable!

The itchy spot in Drakken's chest demands to know why it's Shego, why it's always Shego, why it's never him.

Still munching and sipping, he makes his way back to the bathroom. He feels small now, flimsy, a single solitary thread batting in the wind.

Which would actually make a really inspiring picture to put on a motivational poster. It might also help to look upon something smaller and flimsier than him.

The fly's still there, its hexa-legs almost completely entangled in the net now. Its buzzes are becoming fainter now, fading with resignation, as the wings beat more and more slowly.

Drakken swallows hard. The cookie goes halfway down his throat and lodges there, even after he tries to wash it down with his next swig of juice. _Hurk_.

 _It's not afraid. It's not afraid._ What he's seeing are self-preservation instincts, which exist in even the lowliest of creatures, Drakken knows.

Which is exactly the problem - _he knows_. Biology's not his forte, but Dr. Drakken cannot claim ignorance on any scientific subject!

And he knows what has to occur for those instincts to activate. That _feeling_ , where all of reality is converging to ambush you, the one where you might be in a horror movie that spurns the laws of reality for cheap terrors and pits can be bottomless. The feeling he gets at least once a day.

Drakken pushes away from what will soon be an insect autopsy and examines himself in the mirror. All his weird angles stick out, and his eyes are like a pair of hatchets, albeit ones not sharp enough to decapitate a fly. His shoulders knot and strain beneath the lab coat, which is most uncomfortable but at least makes them appear rather beefy.

"All right, already!" Drakken screams to the spiky-haired madman staring back at him. "I'll do it! Just leave me alone!"

That's when the cookie finally falls apart and tumbles down into his stomach. Because that's the way - wait for it - that's the way the cookie crumbles.

Oooh, he's on a _roll_ tonight!

Drakken clomps back over to the web - as much as a lightweight person in squishy boots housing feet whose dinky little size-six he's never figured out can clomp - and plops down on the floor again, arms and legs tangling over each other. If life were fair, such adolescent-skewed phenomena should have stopped some twenty-odd years ago.

But life isn't fair, is it? Not unless you _force_ it to be fair. Even if he never gets control of his limbs, he'll soon have control of everything else in the world!

That's consoling.

Drakken realizes, with no small amount of inner churns, that he's never watched anything die before. Except for characters in Sci-Fi movies whose actors, he always knew, were alive and well and had long, promising careers ahead of them.

Now, the simple fact that he has so much power over this little bug whose _bzzzing_ s are fading in and out much as his reception bars do on this isolated lair so far away from cell phone towers - the fact that he decides whether or not its life ends tonight - it jump-starts a scratch of benevolence. A spark of goodwill, you might say, and not that secondhand place where Mother had to buy his backpacks after -

Drakken can feel the blood vessels in his neck widening, leaving it in a blotchy place. A place where Dr. Drakken, soon to be Overlord Of The Planet Earth, can't afford to stay.

With a sigh, Drakken leans over toward the web. He's momentarily distracted trying to pinpoint the fly's internal ears before concluding that since his mouth is big enough to hold the whole fly - actually, a whole _pack_ of flies - his speech will be received at any location.

"I'm going to save you," he whispers, though it must sound like a roar to the fly. "But you have to promise not to tell anyone." His sound waves flap the web. The physics of it soothes Drakken somewhat.

Enough so that he can reach a finger forward and swipe the fly free from the strands of bloodthirsty intent. (Ooh, that was poetic! He should write it down.) It _bzzzing_ s a few more times, this filthy little speck of life, before it turns and flies away.

And every part of Drakken swells - inside, not physically, not the way those poor wretched people did before the mumps vaccine was developed. He has done it, conquered the web! That crowns him, at the very least, Overlord Of His Bathroom.

Which isn't actually a whole lot better than Princess of the Prairie Dogs, if you stop and think about it.

"Remember!" Drakken calls after the fly. "You promised not to tell!"

It seems kind of stupid, reminding it when it probably has no one to tell. Then again, who can guess how long a fly's memory is? And Drakken can't risk losing his reputation-in-progress. Plus, the buffoon can translate for his hairless vermin, and flies and naked mole rats are. . . not. . . even. . .close. . . to being. . . related.

Cough.

Ah, well. That fly will forever be in his debt. If it has any sense of gratitude in its miniscule fly-mind, it won't _bzzzing_ about this to anyone.

Speaking of Kim Possible - well, speaking of the buffoon who associates with Kim Possible -

Drakken sighs again, dragging air up from his gut and out his nose. Rolls his sleeve up to the elbow and coordinates his wristwatch with the sky through the window. Though it's hard to judge behind the blackout screen, the late twilight appears to correspond with the estimated time of quarter-past-seven, if the minute hand is any indication (and its entire _purpose_ is to serve as an indication, so Drakken trusts it).

Shouldn't his plucky little teen arch-nemesis be here by now? She's bound to be through with dinner. Likely finished her homework, too, as quick and efficient as she is.

 _And lucky. Make no mistake: luck plays a_ huge _role!_

Of course! _Homework_. Drakken claps himself in the forehead - too heavily, ouch, going to bruise. It's a school night for young Miss Possible! Maybe her picture-perfect parents don't want her going out on an after-dark villain-thwarting mission at an age when eight to ten hours of sleep are still essential.

 _That's no good. No good at all!_

With impeccable coordination, Drakken manages to shake his head and pace his hands through his hair at the same time. Naturally, the girl only shows up when he has no routine prepared and has to fly by the seat of his pants. (What a strange idiom - even flying pants would have been preferable to no plan at all.) Once he's finally feeling self-confident, with a perfectly good doom trap as impatient for her arrival as he is -

She doesn't come.

 _Gnnnnggkkk!_

What's keeping her? Drakken is struck by how fiercely he wants to lava-lamp her to death, to hurry up and get this over with before -

 _Before what?_ his chest-itch demands. _Before you lose your cold-bloodedness? Before you aren't strong enough to have your vengeance?_

It's less a question (or three) than an accusation, one of those creepy newfangled acupuncture needles in search of a nerve to prick.

 _Ye-es?_ Drakken answers. Honestly, but cautiously. _True genius is fleeting, right? Why can't true evil be the same?_

The only response is a barrage from his childhood comic books - the villains who are now his role models. Tough. Ruthless. Out to destroy, no matter how many of their machines Spider-Man pulverized or how much it hurt when he kicked them in the face.

Regardless of whether he'd once saved them from their own crazed robots.

 _Hey, look over there! A mirror! Time to take a moment and. . . heh-heh. . . reflect!_ Hopefully he'll have something hanging out his nose or a bite of cheese he didn't floss away, and then the nag can nag him about that and poof - dilemma solved.

Nope. He's clean. Cheese-less. Tidy, even.

Drat.

The downturn of his lips draws Drakken's attention to how exaggeratedly wide his mouth seems. Do everyone's mouths look like that when they're lying still, or does his stretch longer than normal to accommodate incisors just as big as Hallmark cards?

 _Now if I had fangs, that would be cool!_ Drakken muses. Currently, they're a bit too beavery for his taste. Not that anyone wants to be chomped on by beavers. They're just not very high up on the ol' primal fears list, either.

Still that scar, though. Drakken tugs it downward, reveling in its callous disregard for the pain it can't feel.

The fly's crawling around in the bathtub now.

Drakken scrambles back to the window and peels away a half-centimeter of its black. Fresh, regal purple washes the night sky, pressing him against the pane in awe. He's always been partial to blue - thankfully - but this would certainly add some extra royalty to his future palace, _and_ work with his color scheme.

That'll be _one_ scheme of his that works.

A thump echoes from downstairs. Drakken coils away from the window and slaps the sheet back into its ominous blot. Either Kim Possible has come at last, or the radioactive gophers broke out of the basement.

"Dr. D!" Shego yells. Her voice has flavor now, the spicy kind that can burn the roof of your mouth. "The brat's here!"

"Yes!" Drakken pumps his fists above his head, a sign of extreme dominance and aggression in male gorillas and/or football players, and rubs them there. A maniacal touch all his own.

 _There_ 's some self-confidence, and Drakken balances it between his shoulder blades while his pulse pants in both wrists. Too excited for any worries to catch up. It's go time. Show time. Lava-lamp-flow time. (Which rhymes just as well as "volcano time," so who needs all that expensive land anyway?)

Drakken shoots the fly one last warning look and then flings open the door, jittering down the stairs two at time. The evil banter drips like drool as he flings himself into the basement and instantly locks his hate on the girl in the tacky crop top:

"So, Kim Possible, you've chosen, against your better judgment, to face me again! And on a school night, too. Isn't that precious? Don't you know that can burn you out? _In more ways than one_?"

 **~Spoiler warning: Kim survives. :D~**


	6. I Cannot Tell a Lie

**~A glimpse at some of the fun we might have had if _The Truth Hurts_ had been a full-length episode. Takes place between _Mother's Day_ and _Ron Millionaire_.~**

It all starts when Kim Possible's sweater gets stuck on a nail.

It's not his fanciest lair, Dr. Drakken will admit - in fact, a tiny, suppressed corner of himself caved with shame that she should see him reduced to plotting in this hovel. Now, however, it's got bonus-at-no-extra-charge booby traps, even if Kim Possible only stays snared for a second. The girl has reflexes like a - a -

Well, actually, he's never met another creature with reflexes faster than Kim Possible. Except maybe Shego.

Still, as his nemesis pulls herself loose, she _hmmmr_ s an irritated sound through her nose. Drakken's so giddy he can hardly stand it. The great Kim Possible - frustrated?

"Ah, yes, Kim Possible, now you see what a pickle you're in!" Drakken calls, diving into the cockpit of his newest Annihilation Ray. "Things are unraveling fast now!"

Drakken waits for the appreciative silence to acknowledge his marvelous pun. It never arrives. Instead, two sets of green eyes roll, Shego's next breath morphs into a snort, and Kim Possible's says, "I know, right?" Only the buffoon is snickering from several yards away, and it's certainly not _Drakken-is-awesome_ snickering.

Pearls before swine.

 _Deflation in progress._

Drakken seizes the mental program and hits "Cancel" before his shoulders get a chance to slump. He swings the Annihilation Ray around to focus on Kim Possible's bare belly button. The perfect shot.

Just as he's pressing his finger to the Fire button, a soft, high-pitched sound trembles through the room. Though it can't be, Drakken could swear he hears his mother's words - "why are you trying to destroy these teenagers, Drewbie?" - said in shrillness most human beings can only achieve by inhaling helium. Could swear he feels her tender hands on the aching discs of his spine, hands that would turn hard and pained if they knew -

Drakken whirls about in panic - no, not panic, he's just. . . startled. Discovers it's nothing more than the air conditioner. Can't quite seem to flush away the prospect of needing to justify himself.

His conscience must've been as secondhand-cheap as the lair. It only surfaces at the absolute worst times.

When Drakken turns back, Kim Possible's moved out of range. She and Shego have both, in fact, relocated in leaps and bounds, slinky as a pair of cats.

 _Cats_! That's what he should have used for the comparison earlier!

Drakken lets out his own _hrrrmm_ , throws his fists toward the ceiling, and folds himself back into the nearest wall. Something pricks through the fabric of his lab coat to poke at his flesh.

 _Ow!_

Drakken releases a yelp - that hopefully no one can hear over the now-randomized zapping of the A-Ray ( _annihilation_ just takes too long to think sometimes) and Shego's huffs and charges. For all her sneakiness, she's not quiet in battle. Peels back to stare at -

Of course. Another nail. Who designed this lair, anyway, and why was he (or she - no gender discrimination here) too stupid to realize that you pound the _flat_ ends of the nails so that the pointy ends go _inward_? It was funny when Kim Possible got snagged, but why can't the lair even cut its master a break?

 _Probably because it's an inanimate dwelling and is not logically capable of showing anyone favoritism?_

The scientific surety of his genius glides down Drakken's throat with the comfort of a honey-flavored cough drop.

But when he looks again, Kim Possible is gone. Not dead (unfortunately); she's simply vanished. Drakken doesn't know where, though he can deduce from Shego's scramble for the door that the little brat has fled the room.

Great. Now he has to bust his back dragging the A-Ray down the hall.

Actually, he's not sure he even _can_ without his henchmen. Drakken throws his body weight against the sleek side and shoves with all his skinn - err, _lean_ strength. The ray moves an approximate quarter of an inch.

 _This is not going to work._ It's a rare thought, one of his absolute most hated ones.

Drakken sprawls, spread-legged, to the floor with a thump. Shego can certainly handle Kim Possible herself. Maybe even finish her off by herself. . . but. . . but. . . not playing a role in her demise is like reading all the way to the last page of the book just to find out the dog dies.

Some payoff.

He's still puddled there, pondering that, when a _clank_ reaches his ears. Then a jangling greater than when you drop your keys down three flights of stairs.

Drakken springs to alert on all fours. The buffoon is standing up to his ankles in ruined machinery while the squeaking, pink thing snaps wires out of Drakken's latest, greatest creation, the Ice Fortress Constructor.

"You!" Drakken cries, because it has a much more threatening thrust than the name he can't recall anyway. "Cease and desist at once!"

They don't.

"Gggh! Has your generation _completely_ abandoned the art of respecting its elders?"

The kid laughs again, his clueless little laugh that manages to squeeze in a note of derision. "Um, when they're supervillains, yeah," he says.

And they wonder why the world needs a leader like him to fix its flaws?

Drakken glances in all directions - north, south, east, west - for any sign that his sidekick might sense his distress and come running back. Nope. Nada. No Shego. He's going to have to take this kid down himself.

Lowering his head, air puffing hot from his nostrils, Drakken charges for the buffoon. He has no idea what he's going to do with him when he gets there, so he's almost grateful when the kid sidesteps him and takes off through the lair at speeds Drakken didn't know he was capable of.

Still in mad-bull mode, Drakken careens after him and barks one funny bone against the husk of the IFC. Ohhhh, _holy Brussels sprouts_ , it hurts! He massages the swelling elbow as he proceeds at a limp that the kid will, with any luck, mistake for a swagger.

The boy's already backed himself into a little niche that was surely designed for just such occasions. Drakken takes back every bad thought he had toward the lair's architect.

Except - what does he do now?

 _Tackle him and pin him to the ground! Shego makes it look so easy!_

Yes, well, Shego would make defying gravity look easy.

Feeling closer to Ferdinand than your typical charging bull, Drakken comes at the kid with one arm and the opposite leg open - _slap him, kick him, do_ some _thing!_ Unfortunately, it gives the kid the perfect opportunity to dive between Drakken's legs and tuck and roll himself back out into freedom.

Of course. Murphy was right. Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.

Did Murphy ever also study the law that the more you needed something and deserved it, the harder it was to get?

"Halt this _instant_ , young man!" Drakken says - since the loud, cold thunderclap of a voice is one advantage he still has. "You are making this much harder than it needs to be!"

As expected, the kid's eyes go as wild as an acid/base combo. He swats at the mad-scientist lair table behind him and comes back up sporting an orange ray with yellow enhancement hoops.

Drakken feels all the color drain from his face. Except white. Is white a color?

"Stay away from me, Dr. D!" the buffoon yells. "I _will_ use this!"

Oh, boy. Drakken freezes as if he's been hit with an icy blast of the machine this child just rendered nonfunctional. "Take it easy there, kid," he says. The ray looks familiar, but he can't download a one-hundred-percent clear memory of it. "No need to get hasty!"

"Ohhh, this is really important, huh?" the kid says, all but licking his chops. "Don't want anything to happen to it, huh?" He juggles the precious ray from one hand to another so carelessly, it's all Drakken can do not to unleash his wrath _some_ how.

The buffoon gives him a pseudo-savvy look. "Well, maybe we can cut a deal -"

And that's when it happens. The clumsy fingers execute a flip of the ray, fail to catch it in time.

It falls to the ground.

The whole tragedy seems to happen in sloooooowwwwwwww mooooooooottttttttiooooonn. Drakken's mouth crying, "You idiot! Look what you've done!" His feet springing him forward without even alerting the rest of his body. His arms extended, ready to cradle the ray to his toughness.

His right arm takes the brunt as the ray falls, bounces off, and lands unharmed on the floor - but not before spinning around and spraying Drakken's body with a flash of yellow light.

 _I'm dead. I'm dead, I'm dead, I'm dead. I'm dead. Dead. I died. So completely dead._

After a solid minute, Drakken cracks his eyes open, mildly curious if he's going to see angels, demons, talking lawn gnomes, Santa Claus, or a place full of used-car salesman. (That _can't_ be heaven.) The real sight is rather a letdown after such speculation - the buffoonish kid standing there, pretty pale himself, right down to the washed-out freckles on his cheeks.

"Drakken?" His name goes up into the atmosphere as the kid's swallow jerks his Adam's apple. "Drakken, talk to me! I'm so sorry, dude! I didn't mean to - !"

Drakken sits up slowly. His toes tingle, his tongue's dry, and his arm aches from the impact. But other than that - he doesn't appear to have taken any damage.

Which is not to say he isn't angry.

"There, now, see!" Drakken says, rising to his feet and indignantly swiping away the floor-dust. "This is why we don't mess around with mad scientists' ray guns, because neither _one_ of us is very coordinated!"

Why'd he just say that?

His words came out funny, faster than usual, looser in a way. Almost as if he's drunk.

No, not drunk. There's no slur. But - something. What was that other word people used to describe how drunks talked? _Uninhibited_?

"No kiddin'." The buffoon relaxes to his usual slouch. "Is that how you got that scar?"

About time someone showed an interest in that!

Drakken pauses to collect his story, the details he's created of the massive battle to the death against an as-yet-unnamed Global Justice agent. Maybe more than one. He sent them to their doom, but at great personal cost to his cheek.

And what comes out is, "Well, actually, one day I was working on trimming a machine's circuits. I had a blade in my hand, and my cheek itched, and I forgot, and I scratched it."

Drakken plasters both palms to his lips and chokes on his own saliva. _What the HECK, Doc?_ , as Shego would say. The cover story he so carefully planned - just crashed before it was even off the runway. The truth jumped out and took its place as if - as if -

As if it could do nothing else.

 _Oh, noooooooooooooo._

But yes. Drakken recognizes the ray now, and a dose of real fear crawls across him. No more questions. There _can't_ be any more questions. Thanks to buffoon's shenanigans, he can't even prop up his tough-guy persona and work on cementing the pieces of it back into place.

He's become a victim of his own Truth Ray.

The buffoon holds the ray at arms'-length and stares at it. "What _was_ that thing?"

 _The superpower ray. I can now crush you into tens of thousands of pieces!_

 _A machine that grants me telekinesis._

 _Nothing! Just bug spray!_

All of those wonderful lies he can't tell. Drakken tucks his lips around his teeth and crushes them together, but the truth is bucking behind them, pressing and pulsing like that sneeze you just can't hold back any longer. "My Truth Ray."

"Oh, yeah. _That_ thing," the kid says. "I remember that. It made me the most popular kid in class for, like, a whole school day!"

"I fail to believe even one of my genius inventions could raise _you_ to popularity," Drakken says - quite drolly.

Ohhhh, yes. He can still insult him, as long as the insults are honest.

The kid fully adopts a smarmy smile he's probably been fostering ever since he started running around with Miss Too-Big-For-Her-Britches. A gleam burns in his light brown eyes. "So - do you really sleep with a teddy bear?" he asks.

Drakken has the wherewithal to keep his mouth crimped shut. He does _not_ think to restrain his head before it's already bobbed up and down into a yes.

Traitorous cranium.

"What's his name?" the kid says.

Drakken knows he goes a shade bluer trying to inhale that answer. It hiccups out anyway - "Sir Fuzzymuffin. The Second."

That smile clashes with the buffoon's stupid face. Drakken really wishes to punch him right now, but he's afraid he won't be successful.

"I really wish to punch you right now, but I'm afraid I won't be successful," Drakken says.

The kid trades in smiling for looking hurt. "Why do you hate us so bad?"

"I don't hate _you_ so much. You're actually rather nice. We were Snowman Hank buddies, remember?"

 _Egads, what am I saying?_

"It's your little friend I truly despise," Drakken growls, hopefully raising the intimidation factor by several points.

"Rufus?" the kid says. It's punctuated by a muffled squeal from his rat-infested pocket.

"No, not him - although he does creep me out a bit. I'm referring to Kim Possible." The sloppy looseness to his tongue is starting to frighten Drakken much more than the mole rat does. Everything in his body's turned watery and beyond his control.

"Ohhhh." The kid nods as if he's some sort of Expert In All Areas. It really grinds Drakken's gears, how much he belongs in this boy's position and vice versa. "Because she always stops your freaky little plots?"

"No, not just because of that!" Drakken says, low and furious enough to startle even himself. "Because she has everything I want!"

Of course. It removes his inability to lie yet leaves him with the feeling of razor blades sticking all up and down his spine.

(Not real ones. Then he'd be dead, and then at least he'd be excused from answering further questions.)

The buffoon gapes like a puppet with a broken jaw. "You want a crop top?"

"Ew! No!" Drakken maneuvers both arms down to further conceal the stomach that's turned chemically unstable at the thought of being exposed. "But - look at her, buffoon! She has a big, happy family. She's got friends she doesn't need to pay to hang out with her. She's popular. She's at the top of her class. She has a _future_!"

Ah. There's another really good reason he never talks about this. Besides the obvious, there's also the imminent probability of an onslaught of tears.

"You gonna cry?" the kid asks.

"Possibly." It's the only vague pride-saver that's still honest.

"All _I_ have are my dreams," Drakken says. Every neuron he has is shushing him - those loud, obnoxious, spraying shushes - and it's not the slightest bit helpful. "But Kim Possible is determined to take even _those_ away from me!" He crunches one fist into the opposite palm to graphically demonstrate how his plans have been crushed.

"Uh, ye-ah? They're evil dreams!" The buffoon's face is smeared with _doy_ , one of the latest one-syllable words to convey the timeless teenage message of, _You're SO stupid!_ Kim Possible aims that at him all the time, rolling her eyes and straightening her posture in a way virtually identical to James's.

Drakken's hands shake at his hips. They're angry - and saddened - and scared. Steadiness, dishonest in and of itself, has _always_ been a struggle for them. "I suppose the dream-crushing runs in the family, then?" he mutters.

The kid seems to harden into a sheet of slate - only not gray - right there as Drakken watches. "You mean Mr. Dr. P?" he says.

The comfort resting in the buffoon's voice, familiarity sufficient to call this awful man by a nickname, sours in Drakken's gag reflex. "Well, I'm surprised you put that together, half-wit," he snaps. "But, yes. James destroyed my dreams back in our college days! All I ever wanted from him was an apology - and maybe some manual labor. But did he even care? No, he just stood there and tore me down again!"

 _There must be some way to counteract this. Duct tape? Selective-mutism pill? Give this kid amnesia? Give_ myself _amnesia? Surely I can whip something up in the lab..._

"That wasn't KP's fault!" The _fault_ cracks, befitting its geographic definition.

Drakken cuts his initial turn short to crank back toward the buffoon. The kid's glaring at him from under self-righteous eyebrows, so set in the story he's only heard one side of.

"I _know_ that!" Drakken says. "But she didn't argue with him - she didn't smart off to him, and heaven knows she's plenty capable of doing that! I mean, a father is so rare and valuable a find I understand she doesn't want to disagree with him, so I shouldn't be able to blame her. But I can and I do, because I'm a villain and don't need to follow the rules! So there!"

The room's spinning, like maybe he really is drunk. It would almost be preferable if he were. Wait - no, no "almost" about it. People always say ludicrous things when they're drunk, don't they?

Things that _aren't_ the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, to the best of your ability, so help you God?

Okay, it's official. He's spent far too many hours in court. How can something be so monotonous and still so nerve-wracking?

Meanwhile, the buffoon's wearing his psychologist expression again. "So. . . all this villain stuff is because...?"

Alarms blare across every fold of Drakken's cerebellum. Alarms that won't be worth a darn thing if they don't manage to close those gates before -

"Well, the truth is," Drakken says - unnecessarily, of course, but maybe if he stalls long enough, they'll get those gates closed on whatever's coming next. "The truth is - the truth is - the truth is, I'm very lonely. And it hurts."

Curse and fire his mental gatekeeper.

"No one even respects my wordplay!" Drakken figures he's reached the point of no return - there's no purpose in stopping now. "Everyone loved it when Jafar made the 'unraveling' pun!"

"That's 'cuz Jafar is creepy," the buffoon says, nodding as if he's a licensed mountain-top guru. "You're more goofy."

That stings. Worse than peeling masking tape off your shin. "Goofy?"

"Yeah, ya know. You've got the cheeks." The kid scrunches the flesh on his own until they're too puffy to project any form of malice. "Not to mention the chin -"

"This isn't helping my loneliness!" Drakken bellows.

The buffoon continues to stand there, curved into one big question mark. "Why don't you just go make some friends?"

He might as well have asked, "Why don't you just go recode the human genomic sequence?" Actually, that would undoubtedly be easier.

"Because I blew it, okay?" Drakken can tell he's wailing by now, and any attempts to dial it back down boil in his lungs. "I blew it back in college with the only friends I'd ever made! I blew it with my best employee when I put Shego under mind control! I blew it with the only girl I've liked since high school!"

"You mean DN -"

" _Don't say her name!_ " Drakken says pointedly. Everything's bound to be pointed when you've got imaginary pins and needles and blades nicking you everywhere.

And yet the room continues to ripple as though it's underwater.

"So, let's get back to the part where you don't hate me." The kid taps the end of his chin with the end of his finger. Clearly, he's thinking he's as sly as a fox.

Foxes. Another animal he could've compared Shego and Kim Possible to. Why do the right descriptions always come too late?

"Well, I hate you pretty badly right now," Drakken says. He stalks across the room and kicks at the useless junk that was once the heart and soul of his beloved IFC. "You demolished my deviously designed device!" The _d_ s make him sound that much bitterer - no, it's probably _more bitter_ , because _bitterer_ is like some kind of backwards stutter - and he spits them out as if they're flecks of soot.

The buffoon tries on a smirk. Doesn't fit. Too small.

"But, generally speaking, I like you. Maybe in some other universe we could have been friends."

Drakken tries to catch the words before they soar out of his mouth, but he can't. All he has to show for it is a voice that's gone thin and high, like he's swallowed helium.

" _Are_ there other universes?" the kid says. Everything on his face is so awestruck, it appears to have morphed into a bowl of Fruit Loops, minus the delicious variety of colors.

Drakken drools at the prospect of yummy cereal and the summoning of his scientific expertise. "Well, I haven't done _extensive_ research on the subject," he begins, so modestly it worries him, "but I've heard that many scientists today believe there are parallel universes, or even miniature ones tucked somewhere within our own. They don't think they'll be able to travel from one dimension to another for at least three or four hundred years _after_ time travel is more stabilized, since some of them theorize time travel creates whole _new_ dimensions in the time stream. But you can bet I'm going to master it before then!"

Phew. The fact that he can still boast under the influence of a Truth Ray - good sign.

 _Very_ good sign.

And Drakken takes a breath, lays bare in his head the sentence, "I'd love to find a universe where I've already conquered the world and don't have to deal with you meddlesome kids and your nosy mole rat anymore." When he moves his lips, though, they form something else altogether.

Something that says, "I'd love to find a universe where my posse never laughed at me and none of this would need to happen in the first place." Something he wasn't even aware was dormant inside him.

Drakken wrenches at his uncombed hair. Grinding is the least of his problems. Six or seven teeth break off each of Drakken's gears, abandoning them to a haphazard spin.

He has less control over this than he thought. Oh, _why_ did he have to be such a genius and create a ray that worked so perfectly?

"Soooo - you're still lookin' for revenge on your. . . uh. . . posse?" the kid asks, with the question mark one uses when one wants to verify that one is, indeed, caught up with everyone else.

" _Justice_ ," Drakken corrects him.

The buffoon rolls his eyes, an obnoxious move he's picked up from his sassy friend. "Dude, _justice_ would be if they bought you a really expensive balloon and a Hallmark Card that said, 'Sorry we wrecked your life.' Tryin' to make 'em all your slaves -"

"Indentured servants!" Drakken interrupts. "Indentured servants are bound in servitude as punishment for their crimes!"

The kid pauses. "Okay, I think I remember something about that from history class. But - still - tryin' to make the whole _world_ your slaves isn't even, like, normal revenge. It's just. . . evil. You know that, don't you?"

"I do," Drakken says.

"Oh. Yeah. Forgot who I was talking to." The kid gives a weak imitation of Kim Possible's sniff. "You _like_ being evil, don't you?"

Drakken selects, aims, and even treats himself to a hearty slap on the back for the successful launch of a "Yes." But right on its heels is another word he didn't clear for takeoff - "Sometimes."

"Mostly, I like being the center of attention," is the follow-up, which also never obtained clearance. "Shego says I make such a spectacle of myself, but at least then someone is paying _attent_ ion to me!"

 _Stee-rike two!_ Drakken can almost hear the shout from an empire - or umpire or whatever 'pire you call a baseball boss. How many more before he goes out? (So he's never been a sports fan, okay?)

Drakken searches for an ugly, evil side to the truth the way he would rummage through the comic books under his bed. Yay-yay-yay, he doesn't have far to look!

"Don't get me wrong. I would absolutely love to throw Kim Possible and her entire family into poverty. Reduce them to begging on the streets. And that's one of my _kinder_ ideas." Maybe this time, the truth _shall_ set him free!

Sure enough, the buffoon's Fruit-Loops face morphs into slits of the closest thing this kid ever shows to hate. Which means it's the perfect time to insult the mole rat - or better yet, to stop talking -

"Except there's still Ann. You know, her mother?" The villain accent Drakken's spent decades practicing has to stretch to reach the surface.

The buffoon tilts his head, loosening the slits. "Yeah. Nice lady."

" _Very_ nice lady." A large chunk of something too atomically dense to swallow bobs in Drakken's throat. "She was kind to me back when we were college kids, and she was about the only one. I'm supposed to despise her now, and maybe I do, in some regard, for giving birth to my arch-nemesis and marrying that - that - that _backstabber_! But I don't really have a desire to cause her any harm. Not deep down."

Drakken gasps and falters several steps back from his own confession. He can't even count how many supervillain rules he's currently breaking. Not just being more truthful than George Washington and ol' Honest Abe put together - because there are times when even a supervillain can concede that honesty really _is_ the best policy.

And yet, lying or not, a mad scientist is _not_ allowed to express any emotion other than cold satisfaction and hot fury in the presence of good guys. So what's all this? Confusion, inner conflict, vulnerability he shouldn't even be feeling in the first place - and he's pouring it out on this half-wit who can't even keep his own pants up?

 _For shame, Drakken._ Jack Hench is louder in his mind than the baseball-'pire.

Just when the situation can't become any more dire, it does. Kim Possible herself appears in the doorway. No way to tell how much of their conversation she's heard.

Drakken, however, is taking no chances. He jerks his head away from her and shuts his lips. Even though the ray should wear off eventually, in the meantime even _he_ can't transcend its power.

"What's the sitch in here, Ron?" Kim Possible asks in her native teenage slang. Just the sight of her radiates such a strong cool-kid essence, Drakken's ego slinks back into his heart to hide.

"Ron" grins as if he's on national television. Which he probably could be. All you have to do to get on there these days is not cut your toenails for eleven years or wake up with pimples in the shape of Abraham Lincoln's profile or something stupid like that. "Oh, me and Dr. D. were just havin' a convo."

Also slang. Can these children not _speak_ in basic words anymore?

Kim Possible hikes a disbelieving brow. "Really? How'd you manage that?"

Drakken's very taste buds are burning. He opens his mouth to air them out, and a renegade truth gallops to freedom. "I can't lie."

"Uh, do you think?" Kim Possible shoots him a look laden with irony. "I heard you try on Mother's Day. You stunk at it."

Ouch. Blunt even without a Truth Ray. This girl is _trouble_!

Drakken says, "Well, it's a good thing my mother stunk even more at figuring that out!" Only he mispronounces it as, "No, really. I physically cannot lie for now. I was hit with the Truth Ray."

Why did he say that?

Because what he just said about not being able to lie was the truth. . . and how could it not be?

Uh-oh.

Kim Possible's gaze clinks with his and turns meaner than he's comfortable with. "Interesting." She comes toward him, her smile a scathing reminder of how many times she's bested him. "So - Drakken - how do we disarm this little machine of yours?"

"It's a _big_ machine," Drakken snaps, "and your chum here already took care of most of the IFC! Still, if you want to be completely sure, you can rip the Vapor Condenser straight off the nose in front. And the A-Ray's mechanics are concentrated solely under the exact middle screw on the right side. That'll take care of it. . . but oh, please don't?" he adds, squeaking in the same fashion as ninth-grade Drew Lipsky.

Kim Possible doesn't even honor him by bouncing up and down on her heels and shouting, "Yay-yay-yay!" Her emotions are so tightly controlled. So like her father's.

A large chunk of envy rips through Drakken's stomach.

That's _it_! He can't abide a nanosecond more of this.

Drakken presses on both eyes with the heels of his hands, forcing the wetness back into his ducts, where it belongs, keeping his contacts moist. Then he charges forward, tightening into a missile meant to smack Kim Possible square in the collarbone. But before he can, the buffoon is between them - playing hero - holding out his arms in another question.

"See, she calls me 'Ron' in front of you all the time," the kid says. "How come you can't ever remember it?"

His tone is casual. Laid-back - no, make that completely sprawled out in front of the TV. Drakken glares down at the wooden cracks beneath his feet. In his regular island lair, they would indicate a shark tank that would end all his problems in one bite.

Instead, they join with the mound of unpaid bills on his desk to scream how mired in debt he is.

"Because - it's not important!" Drakken snarls, so hard he can feel his neck veins bloat. "And I don't want to bother learning the name of someone I'm probably just going to wind up having to eradicate anyway!"

 _Having to. You said "having to."_

 _I KNOW!_

Kim Possible slides precisely in front of the buffoon. Drakken locks his feet down, ignoring their pleas to recoil. "One last question before I take you down, Drakken: Why _were_ you so afraid of your mom finding out you're a bad guy?"

Her eyes stare levelly into Drakken's, and he knows she's watching his go wild. Any second now, it's going to explode from him - _I can't afford to disappoint another parent!_ \- and she'll know and he'll never register as a threat to her again.

Drakken does the only rational thing to do. He turns and bolts from the room, hands over his ears, screaming down the entire length of the hallway back to his bedroom.

Because a scream is not a lie.


	7. No Rhyme for Orange

**~Set in the early (pre-Kim) days of Drakken and Shego's partnership.~**

"Yo! Dr. D! I'm here!"

Shego was only vaguely surprised when there wasn't an answer. Her employer was probably passed out on his lab desk. The little dweeb couldn't seem to get it through his head that even a so-called supergenius needed minor things like, oh, say, _sleep_ and _food_ to keep going.

She gave the door a loud thump behind her with the ball of her foot. Nothing. Boy, Drakken really musta been zonked.

Which meant Shego got the pleasure of reaching into her wake-up-Drakken grab bag.

Last time, she'd done a pretty-near-perfect imitation of a bomb going off, right in his floppy hound-dog ear. She'd swear the guy jumped twice his height and then some.

Shego stepped into the lab, throat already prepped for a deep-voiced, "This is the police! We have you surrounded!"

Huh. Drakken _wasn't_ keeled over across the desk or sprawled out on his worktable with his cheeks squished all babyish against the wood. Shego even got down on her ankles and peered under the desk to see if he'd somehow managed to fold his long lankiness into that cubbyhole of a space.

Nope.

Shego considered yelling his name again - and then nipped that idea in the bud. _Way_ too close to that kid hollering "Ollie-ollie-in-come-free!" in a game of hide-and-seek when one of her couldn't-win-without-cheating brothers shrank himself down to the size of a dust mite.

Drakken wasn't in what he'd dubbed "the torture chamber," where he was working on digitally altering some already-annoying tapes of preschool puppet shows so that everyone sounded like a chipmunk high on something illegal. He had an, um, unique view of torture - though Shego had to admit she'd rather part with a few fingers and toes than listen to Big Bird sing the ABCs completely off the top of the treble clef.

The kitchen. A littered-with-Pop-Tart-crumbs plate and a glass crusted with a stiff ring of drying-out milk meant that Drakken had at least been up long enough to have breakfast. Still, that coulda been at 3 A.M. for all Shego knew.

The living room - if he were in _there_ , he was probably watching some pipsqueak cartoon show, and when he saw her, there'd be an instant flipping-over to The Discovery Channel and pretending to be completely absorbed in something yawn-inducing like the history of the paper clip.

Shego listened outside the door - silence - and poked her head in, snicker at the ready just in case.

Zilch. Again.

Shego let the meet-in-the-middle double doors whoosh shut in front of her and growled, low and long.

That was when she heard someone singing some cheesy, woe-is-me throwback to the '70s.

Had to be Drakken, though Shego never would've pegged him as the type who could carry a tune that well. Nobody ELSE in the lair was that melodramatic. She followed the song up the stairs, toward the one place she _hadn't_ thought to check, because it was the one place where it actually made _sense_ for him to have been all night.

His bedroom.

Shego knocked before entering. Dr. D wasn't the type to lounge around in his underpants, either - but, _yikes_. Better safe than sorry. There was a short yip, cut off before it could turn into a scream, a sticking-something-under-the-bed rustle, a stumble, a fall.

Only 'cause his lab coat swished between his legs as he dropped did Shego push open the door.

And gape. "What the -"

Drakken's sleeves were rolled up to the elbows, but you couldn't call his arms bare. Not coated with a clay-thick layer of something more orange than tan that matched what Shego could see of his knobby-kneed legs and a few streaks swiped across his face with such randomness that he might as well have applied them with a paintball gun. Speckles of baby-blue peeked out from them, as if they were embarrassed.

She woulda been, too.

Shego felt her mouth bunch to one side. "'Kay then, I think we've descended to a new level of weird. And when I say 'we', I mean you."

"Shego!" Drakken cried. His voice cracked, _a la_ scared fourteen-year-old. "What a pleasant surprise!"

"Yep. Not expecting to see me at the clock-in time we agreed on, what, ten months ago?"

Hey, _some_ body had to say it.

Drakken slapped on a grin, smudging the bags under his eyes like a new black manicure. "Shego, I can explain -" he began tentatively.

But Shego had already shoved her way into the room and retrieved whatever he'd stuck between his pampered giant mattress and the box springs. A cookie-cutter-gorgeous face looked up at her.

"This - this is a spray-on tan," Shego said. She wrinkled her nose. "The Smarty Mart brand, too."

"Oh, so it is!" Drakken wilted under the glare Shego turned his direction. "All right, all right, I'll tell you. Don't look at me like that!"

"You _want_ to look like an orange circus peanut?"

"No!" Drakken snapped. He stared wistfully off into the distance at some point above her hairline. "I thought it'd be closer to normal."

You couldn't miss the crumpled-up way he said it. It was Dr. D's patented whine of longing. But she'd never heard him wish for _normal_ before.

There was nothing normal about him. Shego had always guessed he preferred it like that.

"Normal _how_ , Dr. D?" she asked. For a second, she didn't have anything sarcastic at her disposal and knew she'd have to stock up for whatever explanation Drakken was planning to give.

Drakken sighed heavily and tipped his body toward the bed as if he were planning to plant himself belly-first onto it, goop and all. Shego dodged in and knocked him back with twin yanks of his collar just in time.

When Drakken blinked at her from the swamp of La-La Land, his eyes were hound-saggy to complement the ears. "Well, the truth of the matter is. . ."

 _Sure. Don't thank me for saving your blankets or anything._

". . . the truth of the matter is -" Drakken lowered his gaze from hers, right down to the boots he'd splattered with cheapy-fake bronze - "today is the one-year anniversary of a very difficult time for me, Shego."

Shego's breath froze around a groan. Oh, no. Not some emotionally scarring backstory. She didn't have _time_ for one of those today. Not when he'd promised her a cat-burglar mission sometime in the near future.

Yeah, bad stuff had happened, and it reeked. But she was NOT going to play the weepy, victimized villain. All of that counted for squat of who she was anymore. The Doc could get so much more done if he'd ditch all that baggage and concentrate on the _now_ he might actually be able to conquer.

Then again, maybe not. Every now and then, Shego got the feeling that whatever he couldn't shake off his back from the past was the only thing keeping Drakken evil at all.

Drakken took in enough air to fill a small blimp. "Well, a year ago yesterday was my last day of being normal."

"Actually, Dr. D, I'm pretty convinced you were _never_ normal."

" _A - NATURAL - HUMAN - SKIN TONE!_ " The blueness was in danger of turning violet.

 _Good enough reaction for me._ Shego beckoned him on with a hand, adding, "So. . .you weren't born blue?"

Orange-smeared arms clasped behind his back, Drakken shook his head. "No," he said, voice reaching for that level, tantrum-free zone that Shego would never admit kinda impressed her. "I was born a garden-variety Caucasian and lived as one for most of my life. It was a Tuesday . . ."

"When you turned blue or when you were born?" Shego cut in.

Drakken's composure cracked. "When I turned blue! I believe I was born on a Saturday. Some day when the weather was nice, I remember. Well, from my mother's stories, not from recalling the actual day. . .there was supposed to be a thunderstorm or something, but it never came to fruition. . ."

Sometimes it was _way_ too much fun to get the dude sidetracked.

Shego let him babble for another few minutes about weathermen and their spotty competence and how if _he_ were a weatherman, _he'd_ never get the forecast wrong, thanks to his amazing genius and his superior tech, blah-blah-blah, before she held up another finger. "So - you turned blue."

Drakken nodded.

"Lab accident, I'm guessing?"

He nodded again and then drooped, for all the world some crestfallen puppy. Shego didn't know _what_ possessed her to say, "Did it hurt?"

Drakken gave an enormous drama-queen sniff. "Not physically. But on the inside, it hurt a great deal!"

 _Oh, snap. Sorry I asked._

"I garnered disgusted stares and whispers wherever I went," Drakken said, as if every lip-curl had been an assassination attempt. "Mothers pulled their children away from me like I was contagious. And don't even get me started on the emergency medical treatment some tried to do on me!"

Shego could understand that, in a way. It would be tough _not_ to resent changing into a freak of nature. Especially if you didn't get any admittedly-pretty-cool powers in the deal.

Still - for the love of Mike, if he was so neg on being hated, why was he a supervillain wannabe?

"It huwt youw feewings?" Shego pretended to lisp, sass going full force. Because it was a pain in the butt to feel sorry for the Doc.

He was too lost in his own reality to catch it. "Yes, it did. Every year that passes -"

"I thought you said this was the first year."

"Don't interrupt greatness, Shego! Every year that passes is another year farther removed from a time when I could look into the mirror without startling myself. When I could buy a blueberry muffin at the bakery without the baker telling me I'd obviously had quite enough already. When I could - gnnngg blaak!" Drakken's patched-with-orange hands talked as quickly and incoherently as his mouth did.

Shego couldn't resist saying, "Aww, Doc, trust me on this. You can still 'gnnngg blaak' with the best of 'em!"

Dr. D shot her a glare that was probably meant to whittle her down, knife-style. "Sure. Mock my distress. But it's so bad I can't even think of an evil scheme."

"Okay. That _is_ serious." Now Shego was being completely sincere. Dr. Drakken minus an evil scheme equaled total exasperation. No way was she gonna lie around all day listening to him grouch.

Shego gestured to the cheap excuse for a tan staggering down Drakken's shins. "So you paint yourself bronze?"

"Apparently," Drakken replied faintly.

"No. That's just stupid," Shego said - flatly. You couldn't beat around the bush with Drakken. "Why don't you come up with some other way to express yourself? Something productive? Write a poem or something!"

"Yes! You're brilliant, Shego!" Drakken cried. "I'll get on that right away!"

 _Seriously?_

Shego shoved herself in front of the Doc and stood a good shoe-length away from him so he didn't drip Claymation orange on her, too. "No. Not right away. First, you're gonna go take a shower before this all dries and you turn into my Adobe Boss."

The ponytail that had been hanging between his shoulder blades like a limp-strawed broom perked into a happy curl. He always looked about ten when he did that. "I'm the boss?" Drakken said.

 _Why do I bother talking?_

Shego shrugged. "Whatev."

That was all Drakken needed to take off down the hall toward the bathroom, announcing to the lair in general, "And so many words rhyme with blue! There's _new, flew, a-choo, Bartholomew_. . . oh, and circus peanuts! Doesn't rhyme with blue, I know, but you brought them up, and they made me hungry for real peanuts! I think we have some. . . "

At least he was back to Drakken-normal. That was probably the best Shego could hope for right now.

* * *

It musta been about an hour later when she heard Drakken call her name from somewhere in that huge lair whose rooms echoed everything in twelve different directions. Woulda turned into some type of hide-and-seek if Shego hadn't stepped right onto a crunchy trail of peanut shells that wound from Drakken's bedroom down the stairs, across another mega-wide hall, and stopped under the door of his lab.

 _Hansel and Gretel, eat your hearts out!_ Shego thought - loudly enough to drown out the rest demanding to know, _HOW again is this better than working with your brothers?_

She opened the door and poked her head in just as Drakken was gathering up his breath for another bellow. It screeched out instead, and he toppled backward over his Darth-Vader-esque chair.

"You really need to consider switching to decaf, Doc," Shego said.

"Ah, but I'm not caffeinated, Shego! I'm inspired!" Drakken, now his typical blue again, waved a pen wildly. The new scar seemed ultra-dark against his chalky, scrubbed skin. "Come in, come in! Take a seat."

 _Oh joy. This should be fun._

Shego parked herself in one of her own chairs and reached for the _Villains_ magazine she never let get too far out of her sight.

Drakken cleared in his throat in the way only self-important dolts could and began:

 _What do I do?_  
 _I am blue_  
 _What do I do?_  
 _It's still very new_  
 _People turn away like I have the flu_  
 _It's not fun being blue_  
 _I know there's nothing to do_  
 _But accept my new hue_  
 _But I try to be normal again_  
 _Silly Drakken_  
 _I am blue_  
 _What to do?_  
 _Boo-hoo_  
 _Boo-hoo_

"Well?" Drakken looked at her, that smile of his just waiting to be validated.

Secretly, Shego had been hoping it would be just a bit more ridiculous, give her a good laugh. She said, "Um."

Dr. D planted his hands on his negligible hips and ironed his equally skinny lips into a line. "What is _that_ supposed to mean?"

"Um. . . you have such a way with the words that I can't even remember how to use my own?" Actually, she had several - _lame_ was a frontrunner - but she couldn't figure out how to unload them WITHOUT sending Drakken back to body art.

His eyes flinched as if she'd blasted them with blinding light. "You didn't like it?" Drakken said.

Shego shrugged again. "Eh."

"Well. . . I have another one." Drakken turned the paper over and flicked an anxious glance at Shego. "It's not finished yet. . ."

"Don't waste your time apologizing. Just read it." _Let's get this over with._

Drakken _ahem_ ed all over again and dropped his voice even deeper than usual.

 _I used to be Drew_  
 _One day I turned blue_  
 _As a suede shoe or a berry_  
 _It makes me look scary_

Shego knew she was grinning as Drakken peeked up. There, _that_ was what she'd been looking for. Mr. Blueberry Muffin Cheeks thinking he looked scary? That was about priceless.

"I like this one better," she said - honestly. "It's catchy at least."

Drakken's face flooded with his own brand of sunlight and turned ten years old again. "I thought so, too," he said, nuzzling the paper to his chest like it was a kitten. "Catchier than that trash they play on the radio today, at any rate. All those boy bands - yicccck." He shuddered.

Shego shuddered with him. She wouldn't lie - most of the kids were cute - but _puh-leeze._ The Wegos' duplicates were more original.

"Still, I didn't call you in here to discuss my poetry, as magnificent as it is," Drakken said, though Shego noticed he rested the paper on his desk as delicately as if it were the Holy Grail. "I've been continuing my research into the teenage psyche."

Of course he was. Dr. D. was totally paranoid that this fourteen-year-old, brace-faced squirt named Kim Possible who'd somehow wound up an international crime-fighter was gonna hunt him down. From what Shego could tell, that wasn't happening, due in large part to that the fact that no one had, like, ever heard of Drakken.

But she didn't bother telling him the odds today. She just watched his jaw jut as he paced the floor around his desk and did some different math in her head. The blue thing had only been a year ago. That meant it _couldn't_ be his big villain backstory.

One of these days, Shego figured she'd get to the bottom of it. Dr. D didn't exactly hide his stuff very deep. But she'd had all the mopey mad scientist she could take for the rest of the week.

"I have discovered a very serious problem plaguing teens today," Drakken began solemnly. His back was turned to her, no doubt so he'd be able to swivel real slow and look _sooooo_ intense.

Shego reached into her leg pouch and came back up with her nail file. "Yeah? What's that?"

Sure enough, Drakken did the big, intense turn, boots rustling on the tile, coming _that_ close to twisting his ankle in the process. "Vampires, Shego," he said. "Vampires."

* * *

"Say what?"

Dr. Drakken watched rare bewilderment settle over his sidekick. Her face had that pinched-in look like that was the only thing keeping it from collapsing in laughter.

"Uh, call me crazy, but vampires were _never_ very high on the worry list when I was a teenager," Shego said.

 _And that was all of - what? Three years ago?_ Drakken thought. Shego was so strong and tough, so cynical, that it was easy to think of her as an old soul. Every now and then, though, Drakken would catch full-on glimpses of her - turned-up nose in a profile that had probably sharpened just recently, wry half-smile that must've once been innocent, movements as supple as a deer's, unencumbered by middle-aged aches and pains.

And his pulse would pound with the urge to shield her. Drakken had no idea why, not when Shego had been hired to protect _him_ and when she was doing such an A-rate job of it.

"Well, times have changed, Shego," Drakken said, pacing back toward his desk. "There's been a - what do they call it? - a 'trend' lately. Teenagers are suddenly very interested in vampires, and not the classics like Count Dracula." He lifted an inexpensive paperback book from his desktop and parked it at arms' length between two fingers to signify this was no work of great literature.

Shego tilted her mane of hair to the side to survey the book's cover. " _Eventide_ ," she murmured. "I think I've heard of those."

"Yes, indeed." Drakken set the book down. "Very popular book series turned media franchise. The story of your basic average girl who falls in love with a 'stunningly handsome' vampire." He quotation-marked in the air, his own cynicism forming hard as nodules.

Drakken paused to do a clinical study of Shego's face. There wasn't any lit-up indication that she was dying for him to continue, but in the absence of the pointiness that said, _Oh, please STOP!_ , he decided to keep right on going. There was no balance in their relationship otherwise.

"And it turns out he was only the first in a long line of well-groomed vampires." With _fabulous abs_ , according to the book, but Drakken wasn't about to repeat a term like _that_ in mixed company!

Shego had no such reservations. "Hotties," she said frankly, and the blush rose as if summoned to Drakken's pores.

"Well, whatever you call it," he blustered, "when did this _happen_? In my day, girls didn't go for the too-pale look, with the pupil-less eyes and the black hair slicked back and all the chompers. . ." Drakken blinked at the sudden reality of what he was saying. "If they did, I might have gotten a date."

Shego burst out in a laugh that always caught Drakken off guard, its register higher than he would've expected. Drakken tried to slice her down with a glare - or glare her down with a slice - or something poetic involving glaring and slicing - but he knew his gaze was weak. He was seeing scrawny little Drew Lipsky, as distinctly-yet-vaguely as if he were in hologram form right before him.

Drakken waved at it. A _real_ hologram - or was that an oxymoron? - would have blipped out and disappeared, but this image stayed put, leaving him looking like one of those cartoon ducks going to such great lengths to swat a fly.

"But how can this be?" Drakken said. "How do vampires look so perfect if they can't see their own reflections?"

Drakken jerked a glance back at Shego's rolled-up form in the spiky-crowned chair to see how she was taking that. Her lips were at least in twitchy motion. "Fair point," she said.

That, Drakken had long since concluded, was Shego-language for, _Wow, you're so brilliant, Drakken!_

"Maybe they have lots of nice vampire friends who will help them assure their fangs are flossed, their hair is combed, and their dapper little bow ties are straight," Drakken mused.

Shego's snicker squeaked again, though it was too cold to be labeled an actual giggle. "Ooh, yeah, that's gotta be it. 'Hey, Bram, I got a big date with Heather tonight! Can you make sure I don't have any bat wings stuck in my fangs?'" She broke into a wonderful imitation of a vampire nervous to be on his first date - though Drakken had never given much thought to how lovestruck vampires would sound - and Drakken found himself laughing too.

"And why would you _want_ to date a vampire?" Drakken's arms began their dance, warming to the topic. "They say kissing a guy who smokes is like kissing an ashtray; what would it be like to kiss a vampire?"

The instant the words were out of his mouth, Drakken wanted to backspace them back in. What very little he knew about kissing came up to blotch his face pink and shiny again.

"Ewww!" Shego curled her magazine into a cylinder and gently smacked Drakken with it. "Thanks for putting _that_ in my head, Doc."

"You're...welcome?" Drakken said. How was one supposed to reply to that sort of comment?

Shego flipped her legs around and crossed them at the ankles.

"Well, _I_ remember a time when vampires were monsters." Drakken shuddered at the memory of Halloween decorations that appeared lifelike (or deathlike?) enough to pounce on him the second his back was turned. "It's not hygienic, what they do to your blood!"

"They suck," Shego said.

Drakken frowned. "That's rather harsh."

Shego rolled her eyes, and Drakken hastened to continue before _that_ could go any further. "What's next?" he said. "Werewolves? Goblins? Ghosts? Ghosts are - they don't have - that's not even a physical thing!" He tried to shape the words with his hands, but they - also not physical things - slipped between his fingers like sand.

"Okay - why are _you_ suddenly so into vampires, Doc?" Shego asked.

Actually, Drakken wasn't - at least, not as much as he was pretending to be. It merely distracted him from the fact that it had been a whole year since he'd been able to walk into a room and not have people recoil from him as if he were a leper. No, make that a whole leper _colony_. At least before, he knew all the stares he received were due to his very-large chin. ( _Pronounced_ , Mother called it. Sounded nicer.)

Sure, Drakken had always wanted people to shiver away from him in fear, but it was meant to be ignited by the sheer evil that radiated off him like. . . radiation! And although Drakken knew wishing didn't make it so - the great scientists had known that since about the sixteenth century - he couldn't help dreaming of being more normally-complected.

Sometimes.

Drakken shrugged one shoulder carelessly, feeling the pad shift around. "I was searching for a way to get to Kim Possible," he said. The girl was turning out to be a handy little cover-up. Drakken would have to thank her for that when they met. Before he destroyed her. "If she's as silly and shallow as all those other little teenyboppers - and come on, she _is_ a cheerleader, after all -"

He couldn't be sure, but Drakken thought he saw Shego's teeth grit.

" - eliminating her would be simple," Drakken said. "All we would need is a vampire."

"Oh. Yep. Great plan. We'll just go snag one of those hottie vampires that always hang around down at the YMCA on Saturdays." Shego's voice had returned to its typical demeaning drip.

It stung worse than getting bopped with the magazine. They'd been having such fun a minute ago.

"That's not - what I meant!" Drakken seethed uselessly.

Shego hoisted an eyebrow at him. "Then what _did_ you mean? You gonna turn yourSELF into a vampire? Cause I'm not on board with that."

"No," Drakken said, scowling until his forehead (his _blue_ forehead) nearly blocked his vision. "No, I wouldn't be a very good vampire, even with all my menace. I hate the taste of blood. Can't even stand it when I bite my tongue."

Which was all too bad. _Count Drakkula_ would've worked.

Shego was snickering again, and it was definitely pointed toward him this time. Drakken punched the _Eventide_ cover, right on Handsome Vampire's chiseled jawline, because it was guaranteed not to punch back. Then he flopped, cross-armed, onto a box stocked with genius inventions that had yet to succeed. There had to be _some_ other way he could turn the teenagers' recent vampire craze back around on them. There _had_ to be.

But for the moment, all Drakken could do was stare at the light, creepy shade of blue reflected back at him and wonder how even the undead became more popular than he was.

* * *

After Shego had discovered Drakken didn't currently have any concrete plans involving vampires, she'd vacated the room. The only reason Drakken would've had to call her back was his knotted-up loneliness. And that was breaking so many supervillain bylaws, he didn't even want to _know_ how Shego's masterful old soul would respond to that.

Drakken plumped more heavily than he intended into his chair, winding himself, and smashed one cheek against the wood. With one flick of his fingertip, his pen rattled to the top of the desk before gravity pulled it back down again.

Concrete? Heck, he'd settle for any plans in wet cement!

Up and down went the pen. Up and down, up and down. Every so often, Drakken caught his reflection in the shiny cap.

The blue wasn't as disconcerting as it had been a year ago - of course, nothing could've matched the utter fear that had strangled Drakken's throat from the inside out the first time he'd seen himself that day. At least he'd always favored blue. Even as a little tike, it was one of his very favorites.

And at least he'd gotten some good poetry out of it. The fact that Shego wasn't too sure about it was only further proof that it was brilliance defined. A _true_ poet was never appreciated in his time.

Plus, pretty soon appreciating Drakken would be required by law. Who knew; maybe he'd start a trend? Maybe someday people would be lining up to try and dye their skin that precise shade of "overlord blue."

 _Someday_ couldn't come soon enough. The blueness made something inside Drakken itch furiously, whether it was a dermatology thing or the abrasive feel of confidence coming and going at random.

Most likely the former. Hopefully.

Drakken squirmed his shoulder blades against his high chair. Wait - no - his chair that just so happened to be set high on long legs, not a highchair that you strapped babies in and fed them strained peas and mushed carrots. And no honey until they were a year old because of something or other. . .

A blast of goopy music, entirely too modern for Drakken's taste, suddenly trilled from the living room. It was joined by a female saying, with passion that didn't manage to elevate her flat voice, "Don't leave me. You said you'd never leave me."

Hmmm. Either his lair had been invaded by lovesick youth with boom boxes - or whatever they used to play music in this day and age - or someone was watching a movie. But it didn't sound much like _You've Got Mail_ , which was the henchmen's top pick.

(Even as utterly brilliant as he was, there were some things Drakken would never figure out.)

Drakken tracked the sound with the same marvelous detective skills as Sherlock Holmes - though Holmes probably wouldn't have stumbled into the living room, working his darnedest to stay upright on feet that had all at once forgotten how to work as a team. To Drakken's astonishment, it was Shego he saw sprawled on the couch, remote resting in front of her.

He flipped back around to stare at the screen. A girl was slowly sinking like quicksand had struck unexpectedly in the woods, wrist dropping back across her forehead, back dropping toward the ground. Clearly ready to swoon.

Drakken masked his shudder with a snort. He'd fainted a few times before, and it was _not_ a romantic occurrence.

Standing over her was one of those very sharp young men that Shego would've dubbed a "hottie," which only compounded the flammable tingle on Drakken's skin. Dressed from head to toe - well, _neck_ to tie, since he wasn't wearing a hat - in black, with equally dark hair swooping back. Not a strand budged even though wind was bombarding them from all directions and whipping the girl's tresses (that was a good word, _tresses_ ) into a frenzy. He radiated a pure, undiluted mixture of grace and class, the sort Drew Lipsky had spent all his high-school years trying to recreate in a test tube.

His lips parted just enough to show the filed tips of spotless fangs.

How did they stay so white? Blood stained, as Drakken recalled all too well from a few months ago when he'd slashed open his face by mistake.

Standing in the background was a werewolf, his face pinched as tightly as his six-pack. The longer Drakken looked at them, the greater lengths his arms and torso seemingly stretched themselves to, until they were completely beyond control.

Drakken whirled toward Shego, pointing at Swooner and Fangs and Six-Pack. "What is this?" he demanded - though, deep down in his heart, he already knew. His heart just didn't always think to provide narrative along with the knowing.

"It's not what you think, Doc." Shego's words had the same rough texture as her nail file.

"This is one of the _Eventide_ movies, isn't it?" Drakken jabbed his finger at the screen again, which had now frozen as if the pause button up in the top corner had pinned the picture to the wall.

"Fine. Yeah, it's one of the _Eventide_ movies," Shego said, rolling her entire _head_ as if she were talking to a perfect moron instead of the brilliant and infinitely promising Dr. Drakken. Her arms knifed into a defiant fold.

For once, she seemed. . . embarrassed?

Drakken felt himself breaking into the wicked grin that would soon be notorious. He had the Ace Trump now, and he was going to make her Go Fish!

Or some card metaphor.

"She- _go_? You li-ike the _Eventide_ movies, do-n-n't you?" Drakken couldn't resist a taunting drawl and a palm-rub.

Shego sighed as though she'd been reserving all her air for this express purpose. "I just watch them to make fun of them, all right?" she said.

"Really?" Drakken said, proud to be speaking in the tone of an unbeliever.

"Okay, and so they're a little tiny bit cute sometimes. Sue me!" Despite Shego's thrust of her hands toward the deliciously towering ceiling, there was a microscopic shine glimmering in her eyes.

It worried Drakken, that shine. It was its first appearance, of that he was certain, and it changed her fierce visage. She looked as young as - as - as her actual age. As nice as that was in a way, Drakken's midsection cried foul.

As in, "No! No! No!" _Cried foul_ simply had much more of a professional ring to it.

"But you wouldn't date a vampire, would you, Shego?" Drakken said. "I would have serious objections to that!" Thunder rumbled between every word, which didn't appear to surprise Shego any.

Shego swung her legs all too casually over the arm of the couch. "Nah, no undead for this girl." Her smirk was stronger than his, beefy from its daily workout. "They only want one thing anyway."

Drakken was bewildered.

"Blood, brain child!" The eyes rolled again, and the sparkle dissolved like wet sugar.

Thank the heavens.

Drakken settled onto the couch next to her and bounced his backside on the hefty springs for a moment. He wasn't ready to immerse himself in solitude again, not without a plan.

Shego released another sigh, like she hoped she could blow him away. "So - what, Dr. D? Are you still feeling blue?"

"Oh, ha-ha-ha-ha-ha." Drakken shot her his best unamused look. "Never heard that one before." He hoped that last part good and stung - Shego always thought she was so _original_.

If it did, it didn't move her face at all.

Typical. She'd let one emotion out of that locked strongbox where she must keep them for half a second, and that was going to be it for the day. Maybe the entire _week_.

Drakken took a deep breath and hummed out it slowly, tickling his lips. Fine. He could pull off calm as well as the next guy. (Well - that sort of depended on who "the next guy" _was_ , but the truth of it still stood.) "I've accepted it," he said with a mature reserve in his nod.

And really - what else was there to do? He _could_ always distort the entire visible light spectrum so that blue came out to peachy-tan, but then the sky wouldn't be pretty anymore. Not to mention the ocean. No, blue was too important a color to remove from the world.

 _His_ world. Ooh, the very thought made him salivate!

"I always kind of liked blue, anyway," Drakken said. "Plus, that lends itself well to poems. Think about it - orange may look more natural, but there's no rhyme for it in the whole of the English language! I'd have to invent my own words!"

Shego laughed in that spit-like way she had. "And we know you hate doing that, Mr. Gnnngg Blaak."

Drakken's hands coiled into fists so they wouldn't fall prey to the sudden urge to pull her hair. "Can you never let anything go?"

"Nope."

Why did he even ask?

"There are a lot of rhymes for green, too." Drakken tried to broach the topic gently and wound up feeling more like an elephant performing _Swan Lake_. This was risky, this was very risky, but it also might be the path to a much-needed connection. "For your green-iversary."

 _She has - one - too - and I want - support - she'll need -_ Drakken couldn't force the letters into words, the words into communication.

"What?" Shego actually seemed confused for a second, forehead puckering into rows of ivory.

"The day you turned green. See, this is my blue-ivesary, and you have a green-iversary." Drakken could hear the curiosity creeping up over him, threatening to overcome whatever gentleness he'd scrounged up. The right letters still wouldn't take shape. "When was that? Did it hurt?"

Shego's back seized stiff, and Drakken's own stomach went taut with it.

But only for a second, and then she relaxed back into the cushions. "When I got my powers," she said, unruffled as Fangs's hair. "And no, it didn't hurt." Shego angled her body toward him and suddenly turned on a smile that left Drakken no doubt that she could dismember him if she so desired. "But if you ask again, it'll hurt _you_."

And so Drakken, with his keen insight, decided to leave that topic alone.

 **~Sorry to any _Twilight_ fans. I'm not really a hater, but this was too good to pass up. :P~**


	8. Interrogation

Dr. Drakken breaks from the madman-circles he's pacing to look in the mirror and frown at his disheveled appearance. Hair spiking and shagging every which way, eyebrow doing its best imitation of a woolly bear caterpillar, cheeks still freckly from his latest scheme to redirect the sun's rays.

No good. He needs to look as impressive as he feels.

Drakken licks his thumb and uses it to swing the spikes into a sweep-back. Who needs ridiculously expensive, salon-brand hair gel when you have saliva, right? The eyebrow takes a little more patience, but he manages to corral its miniature furs back into place. He straightens up to his full, menacing-albeit-a-head-shorter-than-his-captive height.

There. Much better. Not perfect, but better.

Drakken completes another circle, wishing the floor was made of marble so it'd click ominously under him. Of course, he'd need a different pair of shoes to achieve that sound pattern, and. . . well. . .

He glances up at the clock. Nope, no time to go change footwear. Besides, his prisoner's tricky and just might slink off in the time it would take him to tie the laces.

Blasted things never wanted to knot the right way!

 _So go check on him right now, Dr. D!_ Drakken can almost hear Shego ragging on him, even in the solitude of his bathroom.

Drakken glances at the clock for the thirtieth time in exactly twelve minutes. (When you keep glancing at a clock, you always know just how long it's been since you started.) He's probably dragged the suspense out just enough. Any longer, and his victim might start thinking Drakken's threats are empty.

Growling between his gritted back molars, Drakken stalks from the room. Oh, yes, he's taken just enough time for the guy to have worked himself up into a good panicked lather by now. At this very moment, he's probably writhing against his restraints, cords of muscle and fear bulging in his neck. Probably preparing to offer Drakken a bargain, just like your traditional coward in those old spy movies. _Just lemme go and I'll give you anything. . ._

Ha! Drakken sneers at the no-trouble-to-conjure image of his victim's terror. Just goes to show he has _no_ idea of how dire his situation is!

Drakken flings open the door to his torture chamber and lets the door bounce against the adjacent wall with a resounding _THUMP_. It's the perfect setting. Man tied to a chair with Drakken's strongest, titanium-laced ropes, right in the middle of the room. A single bare light bulb hanging eerily above the guy's head, its pull-cord dangling like a daddy longlegs. Your standard doom machine, complete with claws and spikes and lasers, sitting ominously in the corner. Certainly such an inferior intellect won't be able to tell that Drakken forgot to plug it in last night.

Yes, it's a perfect setup. Except for one thing.

The man does not appear sufficiently scared.

(And by "sufficiently," Drakken means, "hardly at all.")

His lips are bunched to one side, an indication of borderline boredom. (Wow, say _that_ ten times fast!) Even bound to his hips, his arms hang with an easy confidence. Drakken has to hesitate and pump his brain full of needless reminders of how brilliant it is.

Drakken shoves his trembling fists behind his back, and they continue to vibrate against his spine. Not from fear. From anger, rationed as carefully as families rationed their sugar and butter during World War II. (And wouldn't that just be _terrible_ , limiting your sugar?) This is the most thoroughly villainous he's felt in months. Why can't other people sense that emanating from him?

Well, Kim Possible has called him "conceited" and "arrogant" over and over and over again. Aren't those just mean ways of saying "sure of yourself"?

Drakken comforts himself with that thought and with The Button that lies in his pocket, bumping his thigh. He steps with predatory strategy toward his captive and leans his shadow over the man. Forced into a sit, this guy no longer has the height advantage.

"I believe it's time to get down to business," Drakken says.

"Uh, ya think? I wasn't expecting this. Kinda put a wrinkle in my day." The man's words are smooth as velvet, seemingly unconcerned.

"It's going to put a wrinkle in your whole _life_ if you aren't careful!" Drakken thunders back. His voice shoots over his victim's and splits apart, like chips of gravel pinging off a windshield.

Flawless so far.

He continues. "State your name!" It comes out as if he's spoken into a megaphone, and Drakken mentally congratulates himself.

"Uh. . . Tyrone." The man rolls cocky blue eyes at Drakken. "Wayne Tyrone. Seriously, dude, is all of this really necessary?"

"Yes!" Drakken spits. "Where were you on the night of July 27th, 2004? At around, say, 6:36 PM?" He strains for the calm, composed monotone of a courtroom prosecutor - scarier than a king cobra any day.

"Dude. I was at the beach."

Drakken nods slowly. "Yesssss, the beach. And tell me, Mr. Tyrone, do you know this woman?" He thrusts out a picture of a feminine being with miles of hair falling down her back.

The alleged Tyrone squirms in his seat, as though he's been sitting so long his backside is going numb. As though he doesn't _deserve_ glutial discomfort. "Um, no kidding I do. That's - "

"Don't get sassy with your captor, boy!" Drakken shoots at him. Seriously, does no one watch classic spy noir anymore? ( _Noir_ is a very sophisticated word, though Drakken has to admit he's not entirely sure of how it's pronounced.)

His fingers itch, and he curls them around The Button to tangibly grasp his authority.

"Look, this is ridiculous," Tyrone says. "I just came to pick up -"

"Silence!" Drakken goes for the courtroom-prosecutor aura again.

Naturally, it is in vain. Tyrone throws his gaze up to the ceiling and snorts, "Psycho."

That does it!

Drakken's fingers ferret out the button again. He likes that phrase, _ferret out_ , as if his hands are sly little...mammals. Beyond that, he can't tell you how to classify ferrets.

Whatever. The Button is pushed, and everything else becomes extraneous detail.

The giant TV screen, required by _Better Evil Lairs and Gardens_ to be in every room of a serious mad scientist's hideout, flickers to life at a slope parallel to the man, where he can't escape it. It fills with fuzzy-yellow puppet faces, the greatest torture Drakken could manufacture short of a _real_ Mr. Sit-Down, flapping their mouth-hinges and atrociously lip-synching to songs far off the tonal register of human beings.

(And the absence of Mr. Sit-Down wasn't for a lack of effort on Drakken's part. He even tried calling 1-800-RENT-A-SIT-DOWN and got redirected to an operator in Ireland or someplace.)

The previously bored eyes pop open, and Tyrone wrenches his buff body against the ropes in a way Drakken hopes gives him a good rope-burn. "All right, all right, I'll answer your questions! Just turn that thing off!"

That's more like it!

Drakken presses the button again, careful for it to remain concealed so that it'll look like it's his ever-so-calm lift of his chin that causes the TV to silence itself. That gives off much more of an aura of. . . power.

His excited arms go back behind him and link until he's primly holding opposite elbows. Drakken knows his grin is devilish, just how he prefers it. "So you did, indeed, see this woman on the beach on July 27th, 2004, approximately 6:36 PM? And you approached her?" he says.

Tyrone scratches at his blue jeans. They're slightly tight around his muscular thighs, but Drakken likes to imagine they're trembling, maybe harder than his own hands. And certainly not from delicious anticipation. "Well, yeah! I thought she was pretty. . . " He runs his eyes over Drakken's increasingly-taut form. ". . . pretty," he finishes.

Pretty _pretty_? Drakken chuckles. A verbal faux pas worthy of - well - himself.

"So you admit to approaching her," Drakken continues. "Did you speak to her?"

"Yes, that was kinda why I went up to her in the first place." Tyrone's voice is dripping with what's either respect or carefully-controlled mockery. Drakken can never tell the difference with Shego, either, and it scares him worse than Doomsday devices and Mr. Sit-Downs combined.

Which would be - what? A Mr. Sit-Down operating a Doomsday device? A Doomsday device composed entirely of overstuffed plush puppet posteriors? That's an ever better tongue twister than "borderline boredom," isn't it?

 _FOCUS, Drakken._

He does, beginning his absolute slowest, most villainous pace yet around Tyrone's chair. "And what exactly did you say to her? Tell the jury what you remember of your conversation."

"Jury?" the kid asks incredulously. "What jury?"

Oh, drat. Drakken sighs heavily. He was hoping no one would question that. Although "no one" might not be the proper phrase since, as Tyrone just backhandedly pointed out, they are the only ones in this interrogation room.

"I!" Drakken thrusts his thumb into his collarbone, proud of himself for thinking to use the more prestigious pronoun. "I am your jury _and_ your judge!" He directs his gaze significantly toward the still-charging doom ray in the corner. "And your executioner, if you don't watch it."

"Okay." Tyrone shrugs in surrender, lip curling again. "Well, I said hi and asked what her name was -"

 _Right away? Tsk, tsk._

" - and then I offered to buy her a drink." The guy continues to look nervous.

Well, he should be! He, Dr. Drakken, is owner and proprietor of this lair. More importantly, he is Shego's employer. Friend. Guardian.

"Alcoholic or non?" Drakken demands. Shego is barely legal to drink, and while Drakken doesn't care much for legalities, there are certain issues where a man must put his foot down.

"Whatever she wanted," Tyrone says. "She ended up having a mini-margarita."

"Were you trying to get her drunk?" Although Drakken's throat feels as if it is slamming shut on itself, his words come out in a lethal roar, pitched low. "Was that your intention?"

"Dude! No!"

Drakken resumes the pace, narrowing the circle with every completion, until he's creepily close. "What are your intentions toward her tonight? And remember, you _are_ under oath!"

The dude laughs from the depths of his chest bulk. "Are you serious? I put my hand on a copy of some old sci-fi novel, told you I probably wouldn't lie if you asked me a couple questions, and then your henchmen threw me in here and tied me up!"

Drakken sees red. Which, considering the lair's maroon decor, may not be all that remarkable - _but_ he also hears his blood coursing in his ears, without the aid of a seashell or anything.

"That was no 'some old sci-fi novel,'" Drakken barks. Something's messed up with that grammar, but just repeating that demeaning term nearly gags him. "That was Isaac Asimov's Laws of Robotics! It set the standard for every depiction of artificial intelligence in science fiction from then on! I wish I'd read it before I built the Bebes," he mumbles. "Maybe then they wouldn't have turned on me."

Tyrone gives him a look that loudly telegraphs, _You're clearly demented, man._ Yet it's not the fight-drained face you grant a mad scientist who holds your fate in the palm of his (deceptively tiny) hand. It's how you look at a pitiful, sickly puppy, forgotten on the side of the road. Suddenly, the ominous background seems to have no bearing on reality, and Drakken feels like he's blending into it.

Drakken's eyes dart and land on a series of ramps latched into the room's walls, only a good eight feet down from the ceiling. Probably once a fire escape. Now the perfect lofty pinnacle from which to observe the goings-on below.

 _Who's small and insignificant now?_ Drakken throws himself up the steps with a vengeance. (Not for them. They're just stairs. Never done anything to him.) At the top, he hunkers over the railing like a vulture, ignoring the pain in his vertebrae as he studies his prisoner.

He knows guys like him, bred - if not genetically engineered - to put the rest of the male population to shame. A _ladykiller_ , so the saying goes, and even though it's not as gruesome as it sounds, the mere thought of it sends fire up Drakken's sinuses and ices the rest of his body straight over.

Tyrone's apparently retained no memory of Drakken's potential torture, or else he just recovers very, very quickly, because he's poised but slack again, leering up at Drakken.

Is that the way he looked at Shego when he spotted her at the beach?

"All right, I'll ask again!" Drakken says. His boom is building toward a climax. For the moment, there's no doubt to screech away what manliness he has. "Once more, because I'm _losing my patience_! What are _your intentions_ toward my - "

"Dr. D-eeee!"

He startles from his hunched position, nearly vaulting himself backwards over the catwalk railing. Which probably would have gotten him a 10.0 score at the Olympics, but also resulted in back fracture. The ratio of risk to reward there isn't worth it.

As it is, Drakken stumbles and lands tummy-down on one ramp, played for the fool again, very much aware of the matching set of snickers from ground level. The fall punches the breath straight from his airways and the metallic landing chills against his navel. How does Kim Possible tolerate what must be a constant draft blowing on hers?

Simple. She's not human, either. No one is. Just him - and maybe the buffoon.

My, that's depressing.

Shego stands in the doorway, wearing a dress that mingles green with black and, in Drakken's estimation, shows a smidge too much skin. Tiny gold hoops that she always seemed to find silly rest in her earlobes.

Drakken's entire esophagus aches.

"What the _heck_ are you doing?" Shego doesn't allot him a second to re-wet his mouth, much less answer, before she stomps over to the guy - the guy Drakken hasn't determined is trustworthy yet! - and hacks off his ropes in four or five good hacks. Even titanium is no match for Shego's plasma.

Drakken himself struggles back upright and tramps his way down the ramps on feet as tingly and prickly as a pincushion would feel if it had flesh.

Shego brushes some rope residue from the guy's shirt. "I'm so sorry about Drakken."

 _Him_? She's apologizing to _him_? With eyes that are sparkling instead of stabbing?

For a quarter of an instant, Drakken considers prostrating in front of the man and pleading - _How do you do it? What's your appeal?_ Combine it with a certifiably genius mind, and the world just might dominate itself _for_ him!

But Dr. Drakken does not beg. Much.

And he's also never really researched the science behind biological attraction. Too embarrassing. Even now, Drakken has to will the blotches back into his pores.

It can't be those cheesy pick-up lines. Shego never falls for those, and that is the one thing that makes perfect sense. In all Drakken's life, he's only ever found one good one. He used it back in college on a lady at the pancake place - "Are you made of Copper and Tellurium? Because you're CU-TE."

She had thrown an entire bottle of syrup in his face. The scalding type of syrup with the HOLY-COW-DON'T-THROW-THIS-AT-ANYONE warning labels on it.

That kept Drakken out of the business of - what's it called, _flirtation_? - for almost twenty solid years. The only upside to remembering the incident is that now he's come up with a new creative method for disposing of Kim Possible: boil her alive in syrup! The girl was clearly an X-Woman in vapid teenage form, out to give perfectly adequate supervillains feelings of inferiority - but who knows?

Maybe syrup is her one weakness.

All of the mutant heroes have one, of course, and most of them are pretty bizarre. . .

And then Drakken forgets all heroes and all villains except the sidekick standing before him. Tyrone has taken advantage of his momentary distraction to snake an arm around Shego - right around her waist! - and pull her in so that they're sharing each other's carbon dioxide. He doesn't say, _Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha_! Doesn't have to; it glints all over him.

Drakken's contact lenses burn as if he's doused them in iodine, and what has to be an entire watermelon sticks in his throat.

"He always gets like this when I have a date." Shego's tone would deceive you into thinking sound waves can roll their eyes.

Drakken stalks between them with all the scientific accuracy of an atom-splitter. He walks another ellipse around Tyrone, who's now much, much taller than him, with absurdly straighter shoulders, making him feel teeny-weeny. That doesn't go well with the doldrums of already missing Shego. "What time are you going to have her back home?" he says.

Tyrone gazes at him blankly.

"Uh, Doc?" Shego's hatchet face is chopping at him. "He's not bringing me back here. He's taking me to my apartment. Ya know, where I _live_."

Her apartment.

Shego's apartment. The one Drakken's never seen, only the couch on video conference calls. And the living room walls, whose color defies naming. Too dark to be pink, too light to be maroon, too elegant to be rust, which is actually a legitimate shade of red in addition to an obnoxious oxidization.

Drakken's thoughts scamper off the walls of his skull like frightened chipmunks. All he can picture is Shego, back in the apartment he can't picture, opening the door and then leaning back in to kiss Tyrone good night when Drakken hasn't had the opportunity to test him for communicable diseases -

More than anything, he wants to demand, _Yes? And_ then _what?_ Forget about blotching, though - his blood vessels would spontaneously combust!

Drakken only permits his head to hang for a moment. He can't let the gloomy and the lonely show through. They will be scorned, not sympathy...ized.

The frustration at losing his command over the English language, Shego being away for so long and in questionable company, the whole evening ahead of him, endless and alone, and everything being so completely out of his control - it all flares in Drakken's lungs until he's ready to upchuck in anger.

 _Yes. Anger's good. We can work with anger._

Drakken draws into his best imitation of his Doomsday device, so strong and deathly still that no one would bother to check whether or not it was fully charged and ripe for doom. "You _will_ pay for her dinner!" he booms. "This is not Holland. Or wherever they got the idea to 'equalize' things just so that - "

"Dr. De-ee!" Shego repeats. Her teeth are clamped together so firmly that her voice barely squeezes through, but it's peppered with a clear warning.

 _Just one last thing. Just let me tell him one last thing, Shego, if I can ever find a way to say it..._

Let's see. It has to be polite, tastefully worded and user-friendly.

 _Like Senior! What would Senior say?_

Drakken turns his back to Shego, moving out of range of her knife-stare. "You will treat her like a lady," he snarls, poking his finger forward at the guy's beefy chest. "If you value your health."

There. That was satisfying! He can't remember the last time he put those cataracts of fear in someone's eyes. Granted, it's of the variety that screams, _Psycho!_ again, just a notch or two above contempt, but if it scares the kid into behaving, he'll out-psycho DNAmy herself.

Just for a second, Drakken wonders if the thought of the cuddly little crazy woman is responsible for the appendix-level pain piercing him. Not that he knows what appendicitis feels like - because you can't experience it more than once, not even within DNAmy's bounds of biogenetics - he's only read about it -

Anyway, it's not DNAmy, and it's not his appendix. Shego nudges him sharply in the side. Very sharply. She must have blades in her elbows, to.

Right smack between the ribs, too. _Ooooh_ , that girl is ruthless!

 _Good, good,_ Drakken tells himself, forcing his body not to double up. _All the better to conquer the world with!_

 _And to escape from young Mr. Tyrone if he gets too fresh._

Then again, Tyrone's ribs probably don't sit quite as close to the surface. . .

"Okay, if you're finished humiliating me," Shego says, elbow poised for another jab, "we'll get going." She flips around with a swirl of glossy hair, pulled back in a green-and-black headband to tuck neatly behind the ears Drakken never even knew for sure were pierced.

The smile he forces comes up uneven. Lips parted jaggedly over teeth that feel bigger, showier than ever. "Have fun," he says, clearing the watermelon lump away with a cough. "Not too much fun."

Shego's greenness seems to smolder. On her path to the door, she stops directly beside Drakken and hisses straight up his nostrils, "You're worse than a dad."

Drakken gawks at the two retreating figures, leaning much too close to each other once again.

Mauve. Her walls are mauve.

And for once Shego's nastiness is a dud. It's closer to a Nobel prize than an insult.

 **~Bwa-ha-haw, I just had to do this. It's been kicking around in my mind for a while now. :)**

 **Great geek pickup line not my own.~**


	9. The Christmas Gift

**~Because I just couldn't wait two and a half more months to write this. :)**

 **Disclaimer: Christian content. If that's not your cup of tea, you don't have to read, though I think Drakken's reaction to the Christmas story is pretty funny.**

 **And thanks to everyone who's been reviewing. ~**

Today was one of the best days of the year.

Literally. Scientifically. For everyone. It had even been - well, not _proven_ , because to prove something in science you had to recreate it - but _supported_ , with research studies and everything.

Today was Christmas Eve. It was the time of year when he swapped out his goggles' usual fuchsia lenses for red-and-green ones, when his mother smelled less like a petunia and more like a candy cane, when even Shego could tolerate a little sap. There was a giant clock in the mall counting down the days, hours, minutes, seconds. Dr. Drakken was wired - stressed in the best possible way.

Only the little old lady down the block and her issue with noise after dark kept Drakken from springing open the windows and hollering into the chilly air, "It's Christmas Eve! It's Christmas EVE!" That was called _consideration for others_ , a staple of good-guy-dom that he'd learned in his seven-and-a-half months of reformation.

Still, Drakken had his vintage-'80s stereo cranked up to the max, as the teens today would say. The Carpenters sang so gently and softly, surely they couldn't disturb anyone.

He'd already devoured a bowl of Lucky Charms and a mug of hot chocolate - homemade, not that packaged instant kind that always tasted like stale Cocoa Pebbles - and as soon as he got home from the Christmas service at church, he was going to set out milk and cookies for Santa. It made him feel wholesome and friendly to himself.

It was the thought of the service that was squirming Drakken inside his lab coat. He was eager to hear the story, which he'd forgotten a large portion of over the years, but he hadn't been to one since he was a little kid - well - okay - he'd been seventeen, but he'd also been pretty scrawny for his age and kind of short, so "little" probably still applied. Was he supposed to bring money? Dress up? And could he actually manage to sit still for ninety minutes with so much _Christmas_ going on around him?

Drakken grinned even wider as he stretched almost on tiptoe to hang his stocking from the mantle, up another mouth-notch with every excited wiggle that coursed through him. There was a delicious tingle racing through his veins like a cellular version of those cars Eddy loved so much. It was gratifying, wonderfully so, to receive everything you'd asked for - and yet it was even better to get a gift that you hadn't even _thought_ to put on your list but that was utterly perfect for you.

Like your favorite Doomsday dev -

Oops. Heh. Drakken rubbed the back of his neck sheepishly. Sometimes it was sort of hard to remember he was no longer on HenchCo's villain roster.

He'd cottoned on - a realization that had nothing to do with fabric - about ten years ago to the fact that Santa wasn't going to bring him doom rays and such. At first, he'd been pretty peeved with the old guy, but now he can see it was just Santa doing what was best for him.

Drakken plucked at his turned-up lips with one hand and with the other fingered the skeleton model for Shego's force field, stored safely in his pocket. Every plane sparkled with fake snow, the tree wrapped in tinsel and as many lights as his circuit breaker could afford. The decorating had begun before the last of the Thanksgiving leftovers were even eaten, but Drakken hated to confine the process to just one day. He added more glitter and glitz with every new square he opened on the Advent calendar.

Even now, his furniture seemed to gawk at him as if astounded by his Christmas spirit, as if unable to reconcile this tenderhearted man with their vicious boss from the rest of the year. That happened every year.

Ah, but this time! This time was going to be different! This was going to be the first time ever that it lasted past the New Year and all into the future. No more abductions. No more grand theft. No more scratching at the itchy hate in his chest in the hopes of pleasing it into submission.

No more bags of freak.

No longer could the furniture tell the Christmas decorations how wicked he was the other eleven months.

Drakken snorted merrily and shook his head. As though inanimate objects could carry on conversations about their owners!

Although there was something about the Christmas season that convinced you they could. Christmas gave him such a gleeful, giddy feeling, like the gravitational force of the Earth had weakened to the one of the moon and you could actually go bouncing high into the sky with every step you took.

There was snow outside, real snow, the kind you never got in a Caribbean lair, luminous under the orange fuzzy glow of a streetlight. Gleaming no color one second and every color the next, depending on how the light hit it. Drakken had already shoveled and salted a runway on the driveway, any wear-and-tear on his spinal disks masked by sheer joyful energy, so Santa wouldn't have to take his chances on the icy roof. Couldn't have Rudolph slipping and throwing out a hoof, after all.

Not tonight.

And now for the almost-best part: wrapping the presents!

He cracked his knuckles and snatched up tape in one hand and scissors in the other. His wrapping paper of choice lay in that annoying half-curve on the floor, but he'd work around that. He _was_ a genius, after all.

Drakken took out Shego's force field, a lightweight metal curve, and dusted it off with his sleeve, his touch a softer one than he knew he had. He'd put it through every single possible test at Global Justice so he could be _certain_ it was fireproof, bulletproof, everythingproof - with a dummy wearing it and everything. ( _Dummy_ as in a small, plastic, vaguely humanoid figure, of course, because any person who would willingly climb in for those tests would be a dummy in the other sense of the word.)

It had passed with flying colors. Mostly green. It was going to come in very handy if she continued to fight crime - a role fate had flung her into, but which Drakken suspected Shego, _very_ deep down, didn't mind too terribly.

Drakken centered it with great care in the. . . well, the center. Where else did you center anything? Not that Shego couldn't take care of herself. But Drakken would've felt like a big useless mothball if he didn't chip in with some protection.

Least he could do.

"Oh, holy night," Drakken sang along as the music began its slow buildup to the goose-bumping crescendo. "The stars are brightly shining. . ."

 _Brrring!_

Drakken frowned. He didn't recall that being part of the musical arrangement. Especially not when it paused for an even five seconds and then _brrring!_ ed again, an auditory pattern that matched his cell phone's.

Oh.

Not even bothering to switch off the stereo, Drakken pulled his cell phone from his other pocket and flipped it open with his chin. (One advantage of having a lower jaw like a slide-out drawer.) "Hello, Dr. Drakken speaking," he said.

"Dr. D!"

It was the voice of. . . oh, what was that kid's name? The kid who was his friend? Drakken was just amazed enough to have any friends at all, let alone someone he'd hated for so long - or thought he did -

Anyway, he was still learning how to be a friend. But he already knew that friends make much better listeners than captives.

Right now, though, the kid didn't sound interested in listening. He just cried, "Dude! Channel 37! Now!" Then he hung up, leaving a warbling sound in Drakken's ear.

Drakken had no earthly idea what that could be about and not very many from the rest of the galaxy, either. Still, it was enough to get his hand - well, with the rest of his body attached, of course - shooting to the remote, punching the Power button, and switching over to Channel 37 before the red yes-I'm-awake light had even flickered completely on.

The sound loaded before the picture. It wasn't the desperate shouts of commercials offering _super_ last minute shipping Drakken heard. It was a laugh.

It was a rich, wise laugh he hadn't heard for three years, one that seemed to be delivered especially to welcome him home.

 _It can't be! It just can't be!_

But the laugh switched over into a song, sung in a gruff, pleasant, universe-righting voice: "Have a ringlin', jinglin', Kris-Kringlin' Christmas!"

Drakken's eyes spread wide. He dropped the remote on his big toe, and it barely hurt.

And then the video caught up with the audio, and his favorite snowman ever filled his screen.

"Snowman Hank!" Drakken gasped. He ran with his arms out and plastered himself to the image, not even caring that static electricity grabbed strands of hair and held it hostage, his fingers pressed to meet Snowman Hank's round white hands. "Snowman Hank, you're here! You're back! You came back! They - they brought you back on another channel!"

"Put away your petty problems," Snowman Hank continued. Drakken had always taken that line to mean, _There's nothing to worry about, Drakken. It's okay. I'm here._

"You're here," he said again, softer now.

Drakken had forgotten about the stereo entirely until it blasted back in at a resounding pitch, crescendo fully reached. "His power and glory, evermore proclaim!"

No kidding. For the past two years, he'd flipped frantically through every channel, searching for the snowman who'd made him believe life could be okay again, while Shego glared at him dagger-eyed and silently told him no it couldn't. And now, just when he gave up. . . here it was.

It qualified as a Christmas miracle if Drakken had ever seen one.

* * *

The church was already a respectful, Christmasy dark when Drakken arrived. It twirled his giddiness straight up to the high ceilings he had never lost his love for.

Rather pleasant now, this place. It used to be a real gossipy church, with a bunch of people who had some kind of radar so they knew whenever you called someone a moron or covered for your cousin when he was playing hooky or laid conquest to the planet.

Okay, so that last one was probably more due to the news than any special sense - but, _still_!

Things had changed now, however. There was a new pastor. . . well, a _different_ pastor, at least. (He was probably just a few years older than Drakken. More wrinkles, though.) Anyway, this man was kind and not fussy and didn't generally yell during his sermons.

The building didn't open its proverbial arms in welcome the way Global Justice and its labs did. But they weren't down there in the dregs with prison cells anymore, either.

Drakken glanced at his watch. Only six more hours until it was officially Christmas! Of course, without prior knowledge of Santa's sleigh speed or his chosen route, he couldn't do much more than guesstimate what time he'd reach Middleton.

On your typical Christmas Eve, time dragged its feet like it was headed to the eye doctor to get those drops put in that would make your pupils all dilated and useless. ( _Oooh_ \- not fun.) But the hour-and-a-half it had been since he'd first heard Snowman Hank's wonderful chuckle had zipped past. He'd flown the hovercraft here as soon as the special was over. Not sure he bothered to switch off the TV. Being on time wasn't a required part of the good-guy repertoire, but Drakken liked the feeling of competence it installed - instilled - whatever the word was - in him.

Drakken took a moment or five to survey the faux holly berries - _faux_ meaning _fake_ , only in another language that was much more forgiving - hot-glued to the sanctuary doors, the white bulbs threaded around the miniature tree tucked in one corner, the wreath bushy as a squirrel's tail hanging above it. To wave at the passing folks, who didn't screech to their usual stop-and-gawk at him as if he were a living sapphire. A few double-takes were really all he got on that front around here anymore anyway.

He slipped deftly into the sanctuary and into a middle pew - not to brag or anything, but the constant darkness of his lairs had given him night vision far superior to most people's. Stealth was another story. Drakken was convinced he was the only noise in the whole church as he dropped into a seat, rotated his ankle wrong, yipped - a very quiet yip - resituated himself, and rummaged through his pockets for an offering, coming up with a nickel in one hand and the skeleton model in the other.

 _Oh, well,_ Drakken thought as he plopped the nickel into the collection plate with a self-conscious clink that got a couple of the little old ladies in front of him passing smiles back and forth. _Five cents is better than no cents._

Well, according to some, he had no _sense_ , but that was a homophone and had no bearing on anything -

Then the lights were brightening back on to normal and the pastor was at the front and it was time to sing Christmas carols.

Drakken did. With gusto. Many, many proclamations along the lines of "Behooooooollllllllllldddddd!" had also strengthened his lung capacity, so that he barely even got out of breath during the drawn-out chorus of "Angels We Have Heard on High."

He hadn't fully let go of the last note before the lights dimmed again and the pastor waved for everyone to sit down, a motion Drakken reluctantly obeyed. How was he going to remain in the same spot for the entire service? It was Christmas!

Drakken closed his eyes, and for a moment, all was peace. No memories of college friends poking at the underclassmen. No fear frenzies about accidentally starting the Apocalypse. Just peace - no calm, not with Santa's visit right around the proverbial corner, but, hey! That was understandable, right?

The pastor picked up a thick, ancient-looking book - oh - it was the Bible - fancy that - and began to read. "In those days, Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world."

The words didn't soothe like they did when Mother squealed them. They were richer somehow, almost majestic from this man. Years and years of supervillain intoning had upped Drakken's appreciation for such a performance. He wondered if the guy had had to take voice lessons, or if he'd just practiced an hour a day, the way Drakken himself had -

 _FOCUS, Drakken._ The mental poke was more squishy-padded than Drakken could ever recall it being, probably as a Christmas present.

Right. Drakken tided up to his full height and pretended he'd been hit with the immobilization ray they'd been working on at Global Justice to prevent even the slightest limb-twitches. Caesar Augustus. Emperor of the Roman world. Taking a census. . .

* * *

 _Oh._ That's _why Mary was so sure she couldn't be having a baby._

Grateful for the church's long shadows, Drakken ducked his head and rubbed his neck until he could feel the blush evaporating. He grabbed the model force field and massaged its rim extra-hard. Prince of a guy, that Joseph. Especially considering he couldn't have been much older than his former arch-nemesis and her boyfriend - with Mary only fifteen or so -

Drakken's fingers paused on the model. He'd been hit, hard, with a sudden knowing: Stoppable would've done the same thing. Drakken couldn't _prove_ it - no one could prove even a hypothetical future - but he could utilize past data to present a compelling theory.

Joseph and Mary had to, for some governmental reason, go down to Bethlehem. On a donkey, probably. And Mary would've ridden all day, being preg - errr, _great with child_ and all.

Drakken groaned to imagine it. If Mary had even an eighth as much energy as he had - and she must have, because she was still so young - then her legs would have cramped in let-me-down-let-me-down! after about five miles. By the time they got to Bethlehem, she must have been half-paraplegic.

And a donkey. If they were like cars and the really expensive models were more comfortable, Mary was probably parked on a threadbare spine and _uggggh_.

Then Mary began to begin to give _birth_. Though the pastor said it didn't detail it in the Bible, Joseph had to be coming unglued. Drakken got queasy just hearing his mother describe the labor she'd gone through with him. Watching a woman actually have a baby right there in front of him would have necessitated hospital care for _him_ , too.

She'd gone and given birth in a barn or a cave or someplace that had livestock - Drakken didn't even want to _think_ about how many health code violations this poor family was accumulating - and put him in a manger, wrapped in swaddling clothes that someone had been smart enough to bring along. Drakken fiddled with the force field again and vaguely pondered what the animals would've been thinking, discovering a human baby among their hay.

They probably sniffed him a lot, Drakken concluded. Animals were much keener sniffers than people, and who knew what scents Jesus had brought with him from heaven?

And then the shepherds entered the picture. They were minding their own business - well, their own flocks - when "the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were sore afraid."

Drakken didn't blame them. The glory of the Lorwardians had been frightening enough.

Then the _real_ trouble started. King Herod - who was actually under Caesar Augustus, not much of a king, only they let him be one because he was a great big bully - panicked and thought Jesus was out to dethrone him, when the kid couldn't even walk yet, and ordered all the baby boys in Bethlehem to be put to death.

As Shego would've said, _What the HECK, dude?_

There were certain atrocities that, even as a supervillain, you just did _not_ commit. _You wait for the baby to grow up and if he turns out to be a threat,_ then _you destroy him!_ No one had wanted to pal around Monkey Fist much after he'd tried killing little Hana - granted, soon thereafter he'd been turned to stone, which sort of cemented his status as bad company.

Ouch. _Cemented_. Bad choice of words.

Anyway, Drakken couldn't remember Herod's exact fate, but it didn't take too much intelligence to figure it had been something similar to Monkey Fist's, something downright. . . icky. Served him right, yet Drakken couldn't help but feel a twinge of pity for a formerly-fellow megalomaniac.

He would really, _really_ prefer to think he would never have sunk so low. And yet how many times had he found himself floundering in some gutter he'd never intended to inhabit? The closer you got to power, the more entitled you got - entitled and paranoid, the latter to balance out the former, since you knew somewhere in your soul you _didn't_ deserve it all. Entitled plus paranoid added up to ruthless pretty fast.

Drakken shuddered, neck muscles writhing.

It could've been him, if that baby hadn't grown up and shown him a different way.

Fortunately for Jesus, his dad got a warning message from an angel and they fled to Egypt where Herod couldn't find them because homing devices hadn't been invented yet. That was probably where they were the wise men came and found them, bearing gifts after tracking a star all this time.

Gold. Pretty, sparkly, valuable, heavy, and very "bling-bling," as the teens today would phrase it. Drakken just hoped Jesus had already been smart enough to know not to teethe on it.

Frankincense. A fragrant oil. Must be like something from Bath & Body Works. Drakken had actually gone in there last week to find a gift for Mother. He'd sniffed all the soaps that smelled like dessert and left craving a donut.

And myrrh. Used for preparing dead bodies. Drakken would bet it smelled pretty great, too, but who wanted that for a birthday present? And symbolism aside, who would give that to a mother?

Maybe they were only wise when it came to astronomy.

"Let us bow our heads," the pastor began.

Drakken did, blinking at the floor.

". . . and pray."

Oh. That was what they were doing. Heh.

Drakken squeezed his eyes tight and listened to the pastor's voice roll out sentences about sacrifice and love. His own prayer formed, sloppy as a preschooler's drawing, between twin bookends of excitement for presents:

 _Thank you, God. For my - my mother. For Shego. For - for - that I'm not. . .imprisoned right now. That would be horrific on Christmas Eve. For my new life now. Help me not to hate the people who wrecked me in my old one. Please let me stay good forever and ever, because I am loving this! I_ should _have gone green a long time ago!_

 _Oh - and thank you for Snowman Hank. Bringing him back, I mean._

 _Am I supposed to say "Hallelujah" now?_

* * *

Although Drakken liked to think he did a pretty good job at listening, he did indeed wiggle through the entire service.

That was why he dumbfounded himself - what a fun word, _dumbfounded_ \- by not flying home (literally) as soon as it ended to set out a glass of two percent and a plate of chocolate chip cookies he'd made himself from his mother's legendary recipe. Drakken stayed among the noisy, gabbling groups of sweatered people and smiled to himself. It was as though all of Christmas were happening everywhere, and Drakken had, for once in his life, been cleared to participate.

The pastor - the Head Church Honcho himself, God's Vice-President of the Middleton Branch - was stationed between the aisles, greeting people with handshakes and wishing them Merry Christmases. There was such warmth about it - a quick press-and-release, not enough to rattle the ol' nervous system - that Drakken stepped into line, even though he'd only spoken with the man a few times.

"That was a really great service tonight," Drakken said with the pastor reached him. "Sorry I couldn't stay still for it."

The pastor laughed, a sound stocked with surprising whimsy from such a strong-voiced character. "No need to apologize, Dr. Drakken. God gave you energy."

 _I like this guy,_ Drakken decided.

Now nearly everyone had filed out and the janitor was dutifully arriving with his broom to sweep up. . . whatever dirtied the floor of church sanctuaries. Communion cracker crumbs? Residue from dusty Christmas decorations?

Overhead bulbs had been switched off, leaving the sanctuary solely, intriguingly lit by the multicolored glow of Christmas lights. . . and the steady brightness of candles. They formed a widely-spaced caravan around the nativity set.

Drakken's attention was caught. First of all, it was a potential fire hazard. And second. . . it had been a long time since he'd seen a wooden depiction of that which changed everything.

There was something different about this one, something that beckoned Drakken's further inspection as he crept toward it, one pew at a time.

Hmmm. Jesus and Mary and Joseph actually appeared to be from Israel in this set. The one Mother put out every year always depicted them as Caucasian, and it was real pretty, but probably not geographically accurate.

And he supposed one where they were all blue was too much to ask.

This one, though - Drakken was caught off guard by the rich darkness of the painted hair, the brown wood used instead of blond for flesh. Gorgeous.

But that wasn't the whole of it. Something more lay under that wood.

Everything was hushed and dark. He half-expected the scene on the altar to get up and run away as he approached, but of course it didn't. It stood, awaiting him, in all his unworthiness. He felt as shy as if he was about to ask it out on a date.

Which would be weird.

Was it that it was a three-dimensional representation, nothing like the flannelboard figures he'd grown up with?

Maybe.

Whatever it was, it dropped Drakken's clomping boots to a reverent scuff. He could no longer envision himself as one of the wise men, a man of unparalleled intellect who'd found his way to the correct location with the power of astronomy. He was more like the shepherds, unprepared, so amazed by the news he rushed here empty-handed. Nothing to contribute.

His chest was a heterogeneous mix of inadequacy and freedom as he gazed down at the crazy, half-grown parents and their miracle baby.

And he'd finally figured out what it was - Mary and Joseph didn't have that rosy-cheeked, holy-haloed look he was used to. They seemed almost real, dirt in Joseph's hair, tired circles under Mary's eyes. The angel hooked onto the wooden stable roof was as awe-inspiring as anything sent from heaven should be, but Jesus Himself could've been mistaken for any other baby. Except for the fact that He was in a Nativity scene, and what other baby would be. . .? Oh, never mind.

Drakken crouched down on his knees to examine the scene from the level of the child he was rapidly devolving into inside. Piece by piece, he went over it.

The wise men and their camels, arriving from the East with their nice symbolic presents that would be absolutely useless to a baby. Mary would've been better off just putting them in Jesus' college fund, but Drakken was sure they hadn't had those in first-century AD or last-century BC or whenever it was.

The shepherds, flushed and frantic, still breathless from running all the way there. Some still held bewildered sheep.

The angel residing over it all.

Joseph, the young carpenter. This brought Drakken some comfort; he'd be able to make a crib - an _actual_ crib, not the term the rappers used when they wanted to brag on how cool their home was. Baby Jesus wouldn't have to stay in that manger for long.

Mary, the plucky teenager who hadn't even gasped and fainted when she'd been told she was going to give birth to God. _She must've been a regular little Kim Possible,_ Drakken thought.

Fondly. That was new.

Ah. From this proximity, Drakken could tell that the candles were the battery-operated variety that wouldn't start one of those dramatic fires they had at the climax of every Disney movie if they tipped over. Clever.

He was in the middle of hunting around the altar cloth to see if it was certified flame-retardant when his eyes landed on Jesus Himself.

Drakken took a deep breath, which still tasted of the seven peppermints he'd scarfed after dinner, and gulped back a wad of. . . no, it wasn't tears. There was nothing to singe his nose or begin a miserable climb from his ducts. There was just a fullness in his throat and one in his heart (but not the clogged-artery type they started warning you about as soon as you hit forty).

Some days when he heard about the God of all time and space and heaven and Earth coming down to die for him, he felt like toe jam for needing to be died for. But Christmas. . . Christmas was different. The already-fragile miracle of a baby, made even frailer placed in a feedbox for barn animals, in a niche-in-the-rocks that was undoubtedly dark and cold. . . being Jesus. For He so loved the world and all that.

Dr. Drakken may not have been ruler of that world, but he was part of it.

And that was why he'd sent his bags of freak packing. Or something metaphorical like that.

That carved wooden baby _did_ look awfully vulnerable, lying there in the fake straw. Then again, so did little Hana What's-Her-Name, and she'd managed to fight off some monkey/ghost/demon hybrid with what her older brother had dubbed her "mad ninja skills." And she wasn't even God!

Still, as Drakken gazed down at that manger, no bigger than a particle, he wished there were something he could give. Some tiny quark of himself to bestow on Him that would say, _Thanks for not flushing me down the toilet and giving up on me._ It would be microscopic, it would be weak, one of a thousand gifts, but it could be genetically proven to have come directly from Dr. Drakken.

Well, skin cells contained all of a person's DNA. But Drakken highly doubted the pastor would be pleased to clock back Christmas night and find dead skin all over his nativity scene. Plus, he didn't even have a pumice stone to loosen it with, and plus that was just stupid.

Drakken stuck both hands into his pants pockets in search. Except for a few pocket-fuzzies, he found only the hovercraft keys - which would no doubt have been even less helpful than frankincense and myrrh in that day and age -

And the skeleton model.

Drakken gave the thing one more caress with his thumb, trying to gauge its size. The science of estimating dimensions and the thrill of giving back parted the muddle in his head. Picture-thoughts marched through, unencumbered by words.

Following them to the pixel, Drakken leaned over and hesitantly slipped the model around the center of the carving so that it would encircle Jesus' waist. It closed with a click and a tremble. The dainty fingers didn't seem so much of a curse just now, not when they allowed him to perform that delicate a task.

Drakken stepped back and surveyed his handiwork. Nothing about the nativity screamed, WE'VE BEEN BREACHED! It appeared as unassuming as ever, except that from close enough and just the right angle, you could Jesus wearing a miniscule, green-and-black, metallic belt.

"There you go," Drakken whispered. It was a volume he seldom reached. "Now that big old bad Herod won't be able to get you."

Drakken closed his eyes and let the gold speckles from the votive flames play and tumble behind his lids. The peace resumed, for a magical moment where he was only conscious of himself, the baby, and the silence around them that somehow didn't feel lonely.

Then one of the chipmunk anxieties he'd confined to a corner of his brain yelled, "DECEMBER 24TH!" and leaped at him, knocking him off-balance and sending his wrist-pulse off into a sprint again. Drakken's tummy tightened, marvelously wired with a thousand-and-three things to look forward to.

He bid the nativity set goodbye and took off to admire his own decorations.

* * *

Outside was cool and still by the time Drakken finally wound down for the night. His toes all but sighed in their cozy blue slippers, the night light shaped like Rudolph's nose flickered in the outlet across the room, and the couch awaited.

Drakken obliged it, polite as he was learning to be. Sir Fuzzymuffin the Second at his side, he pulled the blanket up the length of him, tucked it into place with his handy-dandy huge chin, and let his eyes drift shut.

Santa never awakened anyone upon his arrival - because if anyone saw him, he'd have to join the witness protection program or something. But Drakken wanted to be right there on the scene, right next to his presents, when he woke up.

 _If I ever fall asleep! The excitement is killing me!_

"Please help me go to sleep," Drakken murmured heavenward.

He snuggled down into his jammies and exhaled comfy air that came back to warm his nose. It was a lot easier, this whole not-trying-to-take-over-the-world thing, now that he knew the Ultimate Authority loved him.

Add Snowman Hank and the promise of presents, and life was - truly, genuinely - good. The kind of good that didn't get thrown out with the wrapping paper. The kind that Drakken was still running tests on to make sure it really belonged to him.

* * *

 _I don't know why I'm doing this,_ Shego told herself as she picked her way down the sidewalk.

Except she sort of _did_. The year they'd all crashed at the North Pole, she'd found out that Drakken, champion dweeb that he was, hadn't caught on yet that Santa was a myth. The henchmen had always filled his stocking back in the day - and each others' - and hers, even though Shego couldn't have cared less whether or not she got a Kit Kat bar or a Beanie Baby, which were the henchmen's usual specialties.

Now that the Doc was living alone, he'd have a heck of a rude awakening tomorrow.

And he'd already been through a lot this past year - _half of which, let's be honest, was 'cause of me._ Some bizarre corner of Shego didn't want to watch him lose another chunk of his wait-how-do-you-still-HAVE-this innocence. She'd seen what he looked like without it.

A beard. A mustache. An earring. Pretty stinkin' ugly.

Shego came to a halt in the baby-powder snow coating Drakken's driveway. What the - he'd actually shoveled away two divots of it into the admittedly-perfect shape of sleigh runners.

With a sigh, Shego crouched down on her heels, lit up her plasma, and scorched a tread mark down each divot. The corners of her lips twitched as she floated back to her feet. Dr. D was gonna _flip_ when he saw this in the morning.

As for the footprints - eh, go ahead and leave 'em. Drakken might've been Mr. Whiz Kid when it came to that nerdy chemical stuff, but it'd never cross his mind that "Santa" wouldn't have worn a woman's size eight.

Shego smirked as she slipped the key from her pocket and her senses into the zone. _Pretty_ sure it wasn't breaking and entering when someone had entrusted you with their spare key, but it still went on as easily as a Club Banana top. She'd spent the last fifteen years slinking through the shadows, on side of the law or the other. If she managed to catch Kimmie off guard every now and then, she was certainly doing a lot better than some old fat dude with a buncha snorting reindeer.

The bag, bulging in the least conspicuous size Shego could find, shifted between her shoulders as she opened the door, let herself in, locked it behind her, needlessly stomped her boots on the mat just to wind Dr. D up even further with its wetness. Would've started planning a survey of the house if a surround-sound snore hadn't buzzsawed through the quiet.

Shego kept her freak-out under control, barely taking one startled step forward. Her feet hadn't even come back to the ground, or her gaze swung around to meet the source, before she'd punched a palm to her forehead.

 _Drakken._

Of course he'd fallen asleep on the couch _waiting_ for Santa, his face turning even weirder colors as the hyperactive bulbs blinked across it from his artificial Paul Bunyan of a Christmas tree. Just like any other little boy would without their mama to keep them in line.

Great. Now Shego would have to listen to him saw logs while she sorted through his gifts. And she'd need to eat the cookies, which would probably go straight to her hips, but the Doc's reaction to finding out there was no Santa would be truly nightmarish. He'd cry, and she couldn't stand that. Such a pain trying to get him calmed down again.

At the risk of sounding cliche, Bah Humbug.

Shego let the bag slide to the landing floor and crossed Drakken's kitchen in exasperated strides. Even though it wasn't the quietest choice, the dork could sleep through a train wreck now that he didn't have all that guilt and junk to spring nightmares on him.

Still, Shego didn't want to get out of practice - you never knew when you might need to sneak in past a guard who didn't zonk out as full and deep as Drakken. Very few people did anything as full and deep as Drakken.

Funny. Shego paused with a chocolate-chip cookie halfway to her mouth. She'd survived a whole six months without stealing from some sucker of a scientist - seriously, did EVERYone's street smarts go down the more their IQ went up? And while it wasn't exactly like she calculated how often she wanted to rip someone's eyes out, it'd felt like less recently.

A lot less.

 _Ring-ring! Hello, Shego! This is your real self, and I don't like sharing space with whatever soft touch this is._

In a strange way, though, it made some sense. When you were wanted in, oh, say, _eleven or twelve_ countries and the UN offered you a full pardon for all past crimes - but not future ones - you didn't just run right out and rob the nearest bank. Shego didn't know _any_ one stupid enough to do that, and she'd known some real bozos.

She'd never be Hego's brand of hero. No one could be. Including Hego himself, which was probably why he was always puffing up as if Kryptonite chains were holding him in that pose. But maybe something more Kimmie's style, only with better clothes?

Ehhh - life coulda been a lot worse.

Shego washed the last bite down with her final sip of milk, admitting to herself that Dr. D wasn't a half-bad cook, and tiptoed back out to the living room, leaving the door swinging behind her. There was just enough multicolored, hyper light for her to make out the tangled mess of hype and dyslexia on the copy of Drakken's letter-to-Santa she'd requested for laughing-at purposes. And just in case you _couldn't_ read it, he'd illustrated every item with all the artistic flair of a five-year-old.

Ugggh. If this got any more cutesy, she was going to gag.

Stifling that reflex now, Shego reached into the bag and slowly extracted each of Drakken's presents.

A graphing calculator "just like the kind they have at Global Justice." Because Dr. D was one of the few people on the planet who cared what X was.

A chew toy for Commodore Puddles. Who, hopefully, wasn't anywhere around. That dog still didn't trust anyone except Drakken himself, and that included Shego. The last thing she needed tonight was to wind up with some pink puffball of a mutt hanging off her ankles.

Candy bars. Natch.

LEGOs. Spoke for themselves, though they'd looked more like deformed cow udders in Drakken's kid-grip rendition.

A "honk if you love chemistry" bumper sticker. Yeah, he'd get a _lot_ of honks up there in the hovercraft. _Like, maybe from the geese._

A couple of Spider-Man comics she'd gotten cheap at the mall. Drakken was a bigger comic book buff than Hego and had the most enormous collection of vintage issues Shego had ever seen. They'd probably be worth a buck or two on Ebay, though Drakken always gasped at the thought as if she'd suggested putting a kidney up for auction.

Shego curled the back covers so they'd squish into the stocking and was surprised to feel the twitching again. She could just _imagine_ the look on Drakken's face as soon as he woke up, bleary-eyed and morning-breathed, to immediately check on the stocking - and the grin that would burst all the way out to his ponytail when he saw it sagging under the weight of all the useless stuff he'd been hoping for.

Who knew whether that was worth staying up until some unholy hour? At least it brightened her mood a couple shades.

Especially when Shego turned her head just enough to catch another glimpse of Drakken zonked out on the couch. He was sleeping in an expectant curl, so different from his usual sprawl of gangliness, a little smile curving his lips. Knowing him, he probably _did_ have visions of sugarplums dancing in his head. It would've been almost kinda cute if it weren't for him drooling down onto the collar of his L.L. Bean flannel PJs.

Drakken's snores reached a tooth-grinding level as Shego balanced her now-empty bag on one hip and delivered a snort no one could hear over that racket. He'd adjusted happier than Shego could've imagined her moody ex-partner-in-crime would ever be. None of his tantrums had made it past Stage One in the last three months. Good grief, he was even _asleep_. Alert the press, right?

The whole hero thing had boosted his life out of the dump. And Miss Goody Two-Shoes and her goofy boyfriend always seemed to have plenty of fun with it. . .

Shego shook her hair back. _Sort that out later. It's Christmas._

And in spite of the annoyance factor when Drakken cranked up the saw again and how much she totally despised feeling less-than-hardcore, Shego couldn't keep a scowl on at the sight of her former wannabe tyrant of a boss. Cuddling his teddy bear so close their scars almost bumped. Five stubby blue toes sticking out from under his blanket, rocking in time with the snores.

The picture of contentment.

Shoving the tiny pang of _I-want-that_ back with the rest of the things whose butts she'd kick later, Shego chuckled and pointed herself toward the front door again, knuckling the arm of the couch as she went by. "Merry Christmas, ya little twerp," she muttered.


	10. Tidings of Comfort and Oi!

**~I have returned! With another December tale. . . just in time for Halloween. Enjoy and don't think about the timing too much. ;)~  
**

 _Ding-dong._

Dr. Drakken marches in place on the Stoppables' front stoop as he waits for the front door that's always surprised him with its fanciness to swing open. The driveway is rather poorly shoveled, but Drakken doesn't mind. Gave him ample opportunity to stamp across the snow, leaving rubber-boot-prints that announce to the world that Dr. D is in the house, yo dawgs!

Well, not literally in the house. Not until Stoppable - Ron - opens the door.

The kid doesn't greet him with their regular fist-bump, the one only known by the coolest of nerds. Instead, he cries, "Dr. D! Get in here before you freeze your bohunkus off!"

Drakken obeys. He's rather attached to his bohunkus. (Snicker - or vice versa.)

Once inside, Drakken scrapes his soles against the welcome mat before letting his feet touch tile. Pauses to examine a glove bearing a one-of-a-kind snowflake. Which, sadly, is soon liquidated - liquified - liquidized - whatever the darn word is - by the heater.

"Did you hear the weather report, Drakken?" Ron asks. His eyes are as round and brown as the centers of sunflowers - one of the many plants Drakken has read up on since his, erhm, transformation this summer. "We've got a stadium-sized blizzard comin' our way!"

"Blizzard?" Drakken's ponytail lifts in excitement, exposing his neck to the last of the frigid air. "That sounds promising!"

Ron nods. "They said we could get a foot and a half of snow tonight!"

"Unfortunately," Mr. Stoppable calls from the hallway.

Drakken scowls. How did this man who's only been around a few years longer than Drakken himself get to be such an old stick-in-the-mud? Probably because he has a Very Important Job that he'll need to drive on those snow-packed roads to get to because you can't miss a day -

Oooh. Suddenly Drakken doesn't like where this is headed anymore. He busies himself with how fortunate he is to be able to bypass the roads altogether in his brilliant hovercraft and is even able to stick out his right hand - it's the correct hand, which is easy to remember - when Mr. Stoppable offers his.

Mrs. Stoppable glances up from her papers at the table and offers him a spaced-out smile that clearly pigeonholes Drakken as a distraction. His stomach doesn't even get the chance to clamp down on itself before little Hana toddles in and hooks a stubby arm around her brother's leg. Her other hand waves at him. "Hi, Bloo," she says.

Drakken melts. Not physically - although his ears are going from cold to warm so quickly they feel as if they're being pierced with pine needles. Hana can always smother whatever villain-fire he's got left in him.

"Hello, Hana," Drakken says. It's amazing to him how easily his boom translates into a coo. "How are you doing today?"

Hana giggles.

"She's doin' fine," Ron answers for her. He picks the baby up and bounces her. "Havin' a great time, and she's glad to have her brother home for the holidays. Aren'tcha, Han? Aren'tcha, aren'tcha?"

Drakken follows them into the living room and sinks onto a faded navy couch, the kind that has been softened and gentled by many years and many bohunkuses (bohunki?).

Ron sits down next to him, Hana turning mini-cartwheels in his lap. "And get this," he says, voice slightly quieter. "Mom actually managed to get off work for _five_ nights a' Hanukkah! She hasn't done that since I was a little kid."

"Good for her!" Drakken cheers. It is a victory for this scattered little family he's beginning to care for.

And then jealousy volleys through him - _eight_ nights of presents? - and he wonders why people don't actually celebrate twelve days of Christmas, except in song. Although, Drakken has to admit, he can't see what use anyone in the suburbs would have for eight milkmaids. Now, eight doggy-pooper-scoopers, _those_ could come in handy. . .

Drakken gives the house another perusal and his gaze lands on an item on the kitchen counter. It's a candle holder - a _menorah_ is how he recalls Ron referring to it - one large candle standing tall and impressive in the center, each side a perfect clone of the other. (Well, you can't clone candlesticks, since they don't have genes, but they're absolutely identical.)

"Do you really get eight days of presents?" Drakken says, trying to keep the envy from souring his question.

Ron snorts. "Well, yeah, technically. But half the time, it's batteries for the ol' CD player or gym socks or even -" he wrinkles his nose - "winter underwear."

Drakken's skin twitches in sympathy. There's nothing worse than tearing into a sparkling wrap job, adrenaline spiking your veins, and then discovering a pile of long johns inside.

Not that they wouldn't come in handy on a night like tonight.

Drakken gets up and crosses over to the window to check on their blizzard in progress. Flakes of snow are being hurled from the sky like the clouds want to be done with them, their migration to the ground slowed by sharp gusts. Drakken suddenly longs for meteorologist equipment to analyze their descent patterns. "It's really coming down," he says instead, as if the law of gravity is something new and mind-blowing to him.

"No kiddin'." Ron crosses to his side, arms Hana-less and dangling. "Good thing you got in when you did, or you woulda had icicles comin' out your nose for sure."

"Uh-huh. Green ones." The mole rat says his squeaky piece, and it makes the laughter rumble in Drakken's throat.

He presses his upper arm to the window and rests his forehead against it. By the power of suggestion, he can already feel icicles hanging from his nose. This blizzard is going to make all preceding storms look like incompetent flurries.

And he can't wait!

Sure, when people go out to get the paper in the morning - if anyone but him still gets the newspaper delivered to their door - the ground will be slippery. But snow-slick beats plain ol' mud-slick any day! Drakken got his fill of mud that one time when he tried to conquer Seattle with mountains of it.

And who could make a better snow-buddy than this kid? _Whose name is. . . oh, come on, I just had it. . ._

 _Ron!_

A sudden shriek of wind rattles the windows, and Drakken takes a soft leap back. His left foot descends on something inconsistently pointy, and from there, it's not a long journey to the floor for the rest of him.

Silence throbs in his head.

Drakken pushes himself back to a vertical position, praying his back hasn't given out. Nope. It gives him a plenty stern warning, though, like a deputy in one of those Old West shows. Only the lack of scorn in Stoppable's giggles distinguish it from a thousand other times when he and Kim Possible watched Drakken make a fool of himself right at a moment where dignity was of the essence.

"You stepped on our dreidel!" Ron, still laughing, bends and picks up the object.

It's a - it's a - well, a _top_ is the closest word that occurs to Drakken, though it's more square and more brown and more wooden. A strange, many-colored squiggle of a symbol decorates each side. "What are those?" he asks, pointing to one.

Ron beams and puffs out his chest. "That's some of the Hebrew alphabet," he says. He rotates the top one turn at a time, touching each symbol as he goes. " _Nun. Gimel. He. Shin_."

Oh. No wonder they tangle in Drakken's brain. Letters don't behave for him in _any_ language.

"Do you play games with it?" Drakken says.

"You better believe it!" Ron's grin is dangerously close to breaking the Grin Record set by Dr. Drakken himself the morning after the night he saved the world. "And you win gelt."

"Gelt?" Drakken wrinkles his own nose. "What's that? Some type of fish?" As yummy as fish can be when Mother cooks it, a slab of it would make for some lousy reward.

"Noooo!" Ron howls happily, shaking his head. "They're these things."

He sticks one hand into his too-big pocket and it returns glistening with coins. They look more like video game tokens than legal tender, bronze-gold and missing the picture of a president stamped on.

Drakken gives one a cautious poke. It remains dormant. "Do you buy special prizes with them?" he says.

"Nope. Even better." Ron's eyes dance mischievously at him, and he peels back one corner of the gold - _ohhhh_ , it's foil! - to reveal a solid, dark, mouth-watering brown. "They're chocolate!"

"Oooh!" Drakken can feel every individual hair joining in his full-body perk. "Well, then, pay up, kid." He fakes the villainous growl - it's a shame to let it go to waste after he spent so long perfecting it. "You owe me for a lot of broken property."

For half a second, fear flickers across Ron's face before it appears to register that Drakken's joking. Then he lets out a guffaw, in perfect harmony with the mole rat's, and plops a couple gelt into Drakken's hands.

Ahhh. Nothing like a holiday feast.

Ron suddenly comes up off the floor as if he's been shot out of a cannon, only without the gunpowder. "Dude! Where's Han?"

Drakken runs frantic eyes over the room, stomach already knotting into a game of Cat's Cradle.

"I'm so stupid!" Ron cries. "You can't take your eyes off her for five seconds!"

"You're not stupid," Drakken says, and then marvels at how automatically that phrase came out. Since when does he refute that in those whom he considers intellectual inferiors, which is most everyone? Since never, that's when.

 _Score one for the non-egotistical side of me!_

Ron bolts for the kitchen, stumbling over dangling shoelaces, and calls, "Mom? Dad? Have you seen Hana?"

Drakken gives the room the requisite once-over again, but the child is nowhere in sight. His gaze lands on the window, where the outdoors is, save for a few fuzzy streetlights, pure black. Pure black that a dusky-skinned little girl could so easily slip into.

His heart has a panic attack.

What if she _did_ slip out when no one was looking? Just because she's got that Toddler Mutant Ninja Monkey thing or whatever her older brother's dubbed it, does that mean she can regulate her temperature? Shego, he knows, has thermal control in her jumpsuit, but the Stoppable parents - who, if he may be blunt, pay very little attention to either of their children - probably wouldn't have bothered installing something like that into her little winter overalls.

And what if she gets _sick_? Colds are caused by viruses and not dropping temperatures, he knows, but you can get hypothermia, and that has all kinds of complications. And this is _Christmas_ , where total health and wellness are needed to appreciate the majesty of the season!

Drakken wastes no time with long, dramatic strides; just skitters to the doormat and flails his arms into the sleeves of his coat. "I'm going to look for her outside!" he hollers to any interested parties.

No answer - _harrumph_ \- which Drakken decides to take as a yes. He opens the front door.

And immediately, a spray of whiteness and wetness blasts him in the face like liquid nitrogen. Drakken's brain equally-instantly switches over from _winter wonderland_ to _wilderness survival_.

Problem being, he retrieves only "this file could not be found" screens on the latter.

Drakken inches crabwise across the side of the house to avoid the worst of the wind. Snow continues to blow straight at him anyway, and he spits out a mouthful of flakes. They seemed friendly earlier. Now it's as if they want to drown him and bury poor little Hana in the process.

And that hulking, snow-drenched mass around the corner - that appears suspiciously hostile, too.

Drakken edges up to it with his neck hairs standing in spaghetti-spikes and memories of the North Pole on the spin cycle in his head. He's half-expecting a polar bear to materialize out of the long shadows, baring drool-glistening chompers that outdo even Drakken's own.

But, of course, it doesn't. The suspect mound turns out to be a newfangled swingset, all frosty metal with nary a splinter-ready patch of wood in sight. A double-seater swing. A trapeze. A twisty slide.

It puts Drakken in a momentarily playful mood. With snow still sticking in his eyelashes, he lowers his body onto an already-thick layer of what could be the world's coldest blanket. He pumps his arms back and forth, forth and back, legs stretching and compressing about the origin.

When he's finished, Drakken plants his hands several inches away in the snow and hauls his backside over to them so he won't leave a footprint in the middle of his perfect snow angel.

It _is_ pretty much perfect, too. Drakken gives a satisfied nod and then scratches the icy nape under his ponytail. Why does he feel as if he's forgotten something?

 _Let's see. Stoppables. The house. The swingset in the backyard. A pretty cool set, especially for those tuned-out parents. Did they get it when the buffoo - when Ron was little, or was this just for -_

Hana! Drakken whacks himself smack dab in the eyebrow. No kidding.

He squints. He knows his way around the Stoppables' backyard plenty well, but the landscape is dramatically different smothered in white. Bushes become mounds of flour. Trees snow-covered skeletons.

The snow angel was a mistake. Infinitesimal flakes have drifted into the gap between his lab coat and his coat-coat to bite at his wrists, cracking them as they dry them out with their wetness. That's scientifically sound, even if it doesn't - heh - _sound_ like it. His chin is frozen frigid, jutting out at the obtuse angle it does.

"Hana!" Drakken yells. The snow rushes in to fill his mouth, and his voice crackles, too, as if the wind is trouncing it into submission. Pure black above him, pure white below. Only his paler-than-ever blue interrupts the old-movie color scheme.

Drakken struggles, feet brick-heavy, to the nearest solid object - a tree - and pauses to regain his breath, now visible as it puffs out of his nose as if he's expelling comic-book speech bubbles. He no longer feels heroic. He's small and cold and numbly aware that hunting for a baby in a snowstorm is like trying to find a single Tic-Tac in that enormous purse Mother carries around.

Hmmm. If he could get to the top of that tree, he might have a better view. Then again, he might also fall and break his neck. He can't look for Hana if he's in the hospital.

Proud of his good-decision-making skills, Drakken walks away, giving the trunk a quick pat to reassure it it's nothing personal. No one is going to catch _him_ being inconsiderate of Kingdom Plantae again!

In fact, as he drags his getting-stiffer-by-the-second body up to the top of the swingset, he awakens a flower and asks it to act as a periscope. Though he feels guilty bringing one of them out in the harsh climate he knows they hate - well, the sooner they find Hana, the sooner they can _all_ get inside. Drakken's lips shiver with the prospect of hot chocolate.

 _Yes, master,_ comes the whisper, green in his consciousness, with no letters to mentally - or telepathically - trip over. Not too hard on the ol' self-esteem.

At once, the flower shoots up to the amazing height that Drakken hasn't found a limit to yet. Even so, it must take somewhere between ten minutes and twelve hours before the vine is long enough to rake the whole of the yard and report back to him: _There is no sign of the girl._

"Doodles!"

Drakken hits one knee and puffs into his gloved palms to warm some feeling back into them. The child has either vacated the premises or was never here to begin with. Despite how stupid he'll look, he hopes it's the latter.

Yet part of him still wants to be the one who saves her.

Drakken huddles against one chilled bar and sticks his hands into his armpits. He can't even think of what's stinging his cheeks as flakes anymore - it's more along the lines of getting shot at by a refrigerator with a surplus of ice cubes and a grudge.

And then it comes to him, a voice, like an audible guiding rope:

"Dr. D!"

His name! Well, his nickname. Drakken tumbles to all fours and skids down the slide headfirst. (Mother would've had a conniption if she'd seen.)

"Hana?" he asks hopefully. The heroism is returning to expand his chest. Maybe she needs him after all!

"Dr. D!"

Nope, that's the brother - whose name Drakken can't remember right now. But his plant-powered super-hearing latches onto the words and tugs him along through snow that now humps over his ankles. More angry ice cubes are hurled at him, and surely every step takes him more steeply uphill.

Lots of white. Lots of black. It's boring, it's frightening, though Drakken's pretty sure it's a good sign that he's not hallucinating Shego's favorite beach or anything. Not yet.

The house he can make out through the swirling deep-freeze alternates between getting closer and falling farther away. _Is there really such a thing as snow madness?_ Drakken wonders. He saw a TV show once where a kid thought he had snow madness, but it turned out just to be chicken pox.

No, it's not chicken pox for him, Drakken can be certain of that much. He already caught them when he was in second grade. Nasty case, too, the type where you can play Connect-the-Scabs -

That's about where his thoughts are when he walks, chin-first, into a door that's been left ajar.

Heat floods Drakken and sends the hibernating touch receptors into waking-up pain. He cries out without meaning to, slumped over in the doorway, with four pairs of Stoppable eyes watching him in various stages of curiosity.

But for the moment, it's only Hana's that register. "Bloo?" she says, chubby fingers outstretched to him.

"Hana!" Drakken scoops her up in his arms before realizing he has very little experience with toddlers and even less idea of what to do with her. He awkwardly shifts her to one hip and trails his opposite hand down her back. "Oh it's so good to see you where have you _been_?" he blurts, forgetting to use punctuation.

A giggle. A bubble. Well, _that_ 's no help!

"She was in her room. I looked there at the beginning, but I forgot to check the ceiling. Man, that kid has _moves_." Although Ron's freckles are twisting into confused bunches, his tone is kind. "Are you okay?"

"I am now," Drakken says as water drips off his frosted hood and puddles on the floor. He delicately places Hana back on the floor - he _really_ doesn't know what to do with her. "Now that I know she is."

"You went out looking for her?" One of Mrs. Stoppable's hands fans across the front of her purple shirt, while the other fiddles with a matching earring. Do women intentionally coordinate their outfits and their jewelry? This demands research. "In this weather?"

"You could have caught your death of cold," Mr. Stoppable adds, eyebrows bridging toward each other.

Oh- _huh_! Drakken snaps up to his full height, satisfyingly taller than anyone else in the house, and wipes at his thawing olfactories, preparing to educate this misinformed man. "Actually, cold and flu are viral infections and are passed from one contaminated human to another," he says. "Dropping temperatures often get the blame because these viruses' natural life cycles usually culminate in the winter. _But_ if someone is so cold their body temperature actually drops, their immune system _will_ most likely be compromised. . . "

Mr. and Mrs. Stoppable exchange befuddled looks. (That's a great word, _befuddled_ , when it isn't being used to describe him.) Ron just spews out a laugh and says, "That's our Dr. D."

More warmth floods Drakken, and he doesn't think it's entirely due to the furnace.

"So - err - yes - I was out in the weather," he finishes.

He awaits the disdainful expressions, cues up the image of the medal hanging on his bedroom wall, shining golden. He has proven himself, and that will not change, even in the event that he _has_ acted foolishly - well, that's a little harsh. Sillily - if that's a word - or -

But Mrs. Stoppable comes over and hugs him, and Drakken couldn't be more astounded if she'd turned into the Chiquita Banana and whipped out maracas. (Well, maybe a _bit_ more astounded.) He wonders - vaguely, uncomfortably - whether or not she's aware that he is the man responsible for trying to blast her son with countless doom rays in his time. It keeps him standing there like the slowly melting icicle he pretty much is, despite her arms digging into his sensitive nerves.

When Mr. Stoppable joins in with a clap on the back, however, Drakken wrenches away. A woman's obnoxious touch is one thing; a man's too-firm one is quite another. "You put yourself in a very risky situation," Mr. Stoppable says. Drakken can almost _see_ the exact hazard rate being calculated behind his glasses.

"For our daughter," Mrs. Stoppable says. "So thank you."

Drakken's cheeks flame anew. Praise is an even newer arrival in his life than Hana Stoppable is, and he doesn't know how to hold _it_ , either.

 _Play it cool, Drakken._

"I'm just glad she's all right," Drakken repeats, squatting down to look his little toddler friend in the eye. "After all, what's _Han_ ukkah without _Hana_?"

Then he dazzles the room with a grin, because - seriously - what he just did there was pretty cool.

Mr. and Mrs. Stoppable hunch in together, as if his sense of humor is Serious Business that requires a parent-teacher conference. Ron cries "Boo-yah! Nice one!" and holds up his hand for a high-five. From the mole rat, who's been chowing down on some spare gelt in Ron's pocket, Drakken collects a high-three (so named because Rufus's tiny paw can't span all five of even _his_ twiggy fingers).

Drakken sinks gratefully, if not gracefully, into a kitchen-nook chair, clothes as soggy as a diaper that needs changing. (Not that he _remembers_ being in diapers, of course, but he imagines it would feel much the same.) "Has anyone ever considered rigging up a machine that would allow you to teleport to the kid?"

"Nah," Ron says. "But Wade says he can hook her up with a tracking chip sometime. Only problem's gettin' her to stay still long enough."

Even now, Hana's dashed from the kitchen into the living room, selected a fat coloring book and a red crayon as thick as Drakken's big toe, and settled down to scribble. Ron rockets after her as if he expects the lion on the page to get greatly offended at Hana's utter disregard for the lines, rise out of the book, and attack her.

As Drakken strips off his coat, Mrs. Stoppable fixes him a mug of hot chocolate - from a powder packet - and the marshmallows she serves him are stale. Still, Drakken drinks it without complaint. (Well, okay, so he may curl his lip a few times, but that's an involuntary reaction.)

When he's thankfully washed down the last drop, Drakken wanders in after Ron and makes himself at home on the couch, ignoring the slush sogging the seat of his pants. Feet kicking happily, Hana sings to herself, "La-la-la-la, Flippy dance."

"She's gettin' to be such a little chatterbox." Ron shifts his gaze down to pour affection all over his little sister. "She calls Rufus 'Wuf' now, and she loves to do stuff with him. Look - he even helps her color."

Rufus is, indeed, tracing a colored pencil longer than his whole body over the eighty percent of the area Hana's wild scrawl has missed.

When Ron flips on the television, Rudolph and his band of fellow misfits light the screen and Drakken's heart. It's the first year where he doesn't need to envy their happy ending anymore.

"They don't have many Hanukkah specials, do they?" Drakken muses aloud.

Ron's forehead puckers like the thought is a novelty to him. "No, they really don't. 'S'weird, 'cuz the real story of Hanukkah is super-amazing and would make a totally awesome TV show!"

Drakken's factual antennae (which, in the interest of being factual, do not physically exist) go up. Ooh! He's detecting new information to acquire!

"What _is_ the real story of Hanukkah?" he asks as Hana pulls herself, one leg at a time, up onto the couch between them. "You know, my mother says we've got Jewish ancestors on both sides, so I should know, but no one's practiced in my family for a long time and - "

"Aw, it's pretty bon-diggety," Ron says with a sage-looking nod. "But you know who tells it even better than _me_? My dad."

"What do I do better?" Mr. Stoppable appears in the doorway that his children have encircled with paper snowflakes. (Drakken loves the fact that Ron, now a mature high school graduate, culinary student, and - oh, yes - Ultimate Monkey Master, does not consider himself too cool for fun traditions.)

Ron's volume drops to someplace hopeful but not expectant. "Tell the story of Hanukkah."

Drakken squirms, suddenly conscious of every damp bit of himself. Father-son scenes always make him feel like he accidentally walked in on a party he wasn't invited to.

The squirmy, sopping feeling dries up some, though, when Mr. Stoppable actually breaks into a smile - a small, tight one, but a smile nonetheless. "You know, it's been a long time since we've done that," he says. "Give me five minutes to wrap up this paperwork and I'll be right with you."

Ron relaxes into the couch until his back molds with its squishy one. "Boo-yah," he says again, only he whispers it this time, as if he might wake himself up if he's not careful.

It's closer to seven minutes, according to Drakken's high-tech watch, but Mr. Stoppable is true to his word otherwise. He sits in the center of the sofa and gathers Hana into his lap with an ease that makes Drakken jealous. By the look on Ron's face, he might be crawling right in with her pretty soon.

"All right, the Stoppable household presents: 'The Story of Hanukkah'," Mr. Stoppable says, his voice as solemn as a movie announcer. Drakken is secretly impressed.

"Subtitle: 'Don't Mess With the Chosen Ones, Yo!'" Ron interjects.

Drakken giggles and doesn't even mind how preadolescent he sounds.

Mr. Stoppable rests one hand atop Hana's hair and begins, "A long, long time ago - beginning in 190 B.C., if you can believe that - the Greek army took up residence in Israel to win a military battle and began persecuting the Jewish people who lived there. They banned the observance of the Sabbath and other signs of God's covenant with Abraham. . ."

The story he's spinning out is not pretty, with statues of Greek gods invading the temple, which even a very religiously clueless person like Drakken can tell is a major no-no, and Jewish people rebelling with death and bloodshed. But Mr. Stoppable recounts it so calmly - not in that maddening calm that reduces something amazing into a matter-of-fact series of events - just the softness that comes from not wanting to overwhelm your audience . . anyway, Drakken almost doesn't realize he's snuggling into the fabric of the couch. It feels utterly natural.

As Mr. Stoppable explains about the miraculous olive oil that burned a week longer than it scientifically should have, Drakken glances around at these people he once thought so little of. Their house is warm and cozy, velvet with the smell of dinner and chocolate - and they've opened it to _him_ , Dr. Drakken, once a semi-notorious supervillain! And at this moment, he's not sure there's anywhere else on Earth he'd rather be. Not even Santa's workshop.

After all, Drakken knows from experience, it can get awfully cold up there at the North Pole.

 **~The "snow madness" show Drakken references is _George Shrinks_. I am a child of PBS Kids.~**


	11. Come and Go

**~The long-awaited (I hope) second part of Shego's origin story!**

 **Can't talk. Need to dash, but I hope you all enjoy. Thanks to everyone who's been reviewing.~**

When Shego yanked her ancient black duffel bag out from under her bed, a thick crop of dust went straight for her nostrils and made her sneeze. She stifled it into her elbow and flopped the bag onto her mattress, looking at it with more affection that she'd felt toward anything in the past, oh say, six years or so.

It was time to flee the cookoo's nest before she went cookoo herself.

 _Sorry, bros. There's just no bucks in this biz._

 _Oh, yeah, and being in the same room with you makes me homicidal._

Shego had always prided herself on being practical. Though she didn't consider herself heartless, she let her emotions follow the profits. And the good guys vs. the baddies? There was _no_ contest as to who was on top.

Sure, Aviarius and the Mathter always botched up their crimes, but that was because everyone who stayed in Go City was doomed to be a terminal loser. Somewhere else out there, there were actual villains who _didn't_ rely on gimmicky costumes and bad puns, who _didn't_ surrender the loot before the bank could even file an insurance report. Who wouldn't want some of that action?

Yeah. Giant pass on terrorizing the brainless citizens of Go City. She'd spare Hego and his little band of freaks the embarrassment. Come on, how awkward would that be? And Shego wanted to get as far away from this crummy little town as possible. What happened to Go City wasn't her fight. It had never been her fight.

Shego gazed around the room and wondered if she was supposed to be feeling nostalgic right now. But it was hard to get choked up over the so-old-it-had-a-green-cap-and-a-pull-switch desk lamp and the hip-hop posters and the flea-market drapes that had once belonged to one of Hego's kid-drones. No matter what all that real estate red-tape junk said, a place didn't automatically become your home just because you'd lived there for half a decade or more.

None of this meant _squat_ to her anymore.

 _At least the door has a lock,_ Shego thought. Hego blew smoke out both ends about that - if they locked it, it was a fire hazard, and if they _didn't_ lock it, some not-so-supervillain was going to come eat them in the night. Personally, Shego would gladly have sacrificed her so-called safety for a scrap of privacy in this testosterone-reeking house.

The last thing she needed was for Hego to come barging in - big dork had never heard of a handy little invention called the knock - to find her opening her dresser drawers and emptying them of a few favorite outfits to bring along. He'd pull that kicked-puppy face and lecture her on the importance of family until Shego finally lost it and decked him. That was bound to happen any day now if she didn't get the stink _outta_ here.

Otherwise, Hego probably wouldn't have even noticed her packing and prepping. Hego wouldn't have noticed an avalanche barreling toward him when he was on one of his crusades, which was every waking moment.

Heck, he probably dreamed about it, too. Shego was definitely NOT gonna miss living in a Captain America serial that never ran out of film.

Mego? Shego shrugged as she tossed a pair of socks into the duffel. He was sharper than Hego - it would be hard _not_ to be without being comatose - but he saved up most of his attention for the most important person in his life - Mego.

It would _also_ be pretty nice not having to sit at the dinner table and listen to the dude recount how he was able to shrink and take out the bad guy by crawling up his pant leg - like that was _every_ hero's goal in life - and how he'd actually knocked out some henchman once in a stroke of luck that he'd never managed to repeat, and blah and blah and blah-blah-blah.

And the twins - nobody kept secrets in their little world, and every child development book Shego had gotten her hands on said they were just now capable of learning that other people didn't just exist to assist them the way they did in video games.

The twins. Shego paused in twisting up the roll of her deodorant to check if she was due for a restock. A wry frown twisted up with it. Now, _those_ little squirts she might actually miss. When they weren't picking their noses and having booger-flicking contests, that is.

 _Ewww. That's one way to sink a nostalgia ship._

Shego reached into her sock drawer and came out with her wallet, loaded up with fifty bucks in cash and the credit card Hego had "let" her buy for graduation. She squeezed it so tight that it seemed to throb with Hego's and Mego's and inevitably the Wegos' wasted potentials.

Community college. Dead-end job. Working your tail off to save lame people from even lamer criminals and only accepting the every-now-and-then "thank you" for a paycheck.

 _Right. You all have fun driving yourselves into a mental asylum. Make Mom and Dad proud. I'm gone._

Shego folded the wallet in around her forest-green winter sweater and sat back, grinning to herself. With each new item she packed, this thing took on a whole new layer of reality. She was actually _leaving_ , and the ever-present sparks down her backbone craned toward a non-sucky future for the first time in ages.

A boot-dented Walkman in the corner caught Shego's eyes, but she rolled them and shook her head. Nah. She was traveling light - and wouldn't she just look like some little novice teenybopper walking into some sophisticated villains' club carrying _that_ reject from the recycling bin? Her career would basically be shot before it even got started.

 _My career. Pile THAT on top of all that reality._

It all made total sense. Shego was the only member of Team Go who could actually sneak up on somebody without having to shrink to the size of a crumb, who could throw a decent punch, who could slip through villains' security lasers and swap their kill-switch for a garage door opener in the half-second their back was turned. And those were the only parts of the job she genuinely enjoyed.

A total no-duh.

Shego stepped back and tapped her chin, running through the checklist in her head. She'd either grab her toothbrush and 'paste after she used them in the morning or buy some new ones wherever she ended up. Car keys would waiting on the ring by the table for her to snag on the way out the door. Everything else she needed she was already wearing - jumpsuit, gloves, boots.

Mask.

Shego flung it off as if it were a polka-dotted bow tie and watched it fall emptily to the floor. Nobody more than two towns over had ever heard of Team Go. She'd be the one building up a rep for that black-crisscrossed-with-signature-color getup, one that would just do _wonders_ for Hego's PR.

And, seriously, the mask was stupid, matching or not. It hadn't come in handy since she was in tenth grade and needed it to cover a major T-zone breakout. _Could I please NOT get people wondering who kidnapped Tonto and stole my horse? Can I just walk around like a person?_

Then again, criminals needed masks maybe even more than superheroes did.

Reluctantly, Shego lifted the mask between two fingers and chucked it into her duffel bag. Only because it took up zero space did she leave it there.

Nah, there was no reason to forfeit the jumpsuit when it was the only stylish decision Hego had ever made. Without her, her brothers were never gonna be able to outshout the rap sheet Shego was about to give it.

She could almost feel _sorry_ for them.

Almost.

Shego closed the duffel bag up, just for tonight. The zipper gave a definitive zing as it shot to the top, the sort of noise the Walkman let out when you finished the last song on the tape.

Punctuating the end.

* * *

The opportunity came sooner than Shego had expected. They'd just finished their breakfast the next morning when Go Tower was paged by the loser-mayor, whose lisp made mincemeat out of the news that some new supervillain calling himself the Symmetrizer had just robbed the First National Bank.

From Hego's reaction, you'da thought the Nazis had invaded. He instantly hustled the quote-unquote team out to the car he insisted on driving. Mego rode shotgun, and Shego, natch, was crammed in the backseat between the two little dorks, who were hopping up and down like a pair of hyperactive toads.

Shego had no idea why. Half of the villains in Go City were just weird guys who were having a midlife crisis and couldn't afford a new car. They'd run a few blocks, and then their cholesterol levels would catch up with them, and - bam. Self-correcting problem.

The scrawny kid standing nervously outside the bank, with the scar on his face he'd undoubtedly try to pass off as a battle wound when Shego would've bet her savings account it was a razor nick, didn't exactly fit that mold, but he was no more intimidating. His shaky hands and the whatever-it-was weapon they were clutching looked about ten times too big for his arms.

Oh, but the costume - the costume was pure supervillain-tacky, definitely with the whole vibe of a Halloween costume that had hung in the closet for the last ten years, protected by the fact that any moth that tried to chew holes through that thing woulda been poisoned on the spot.

It was dark green - not deep, just dingy. Three big buttons straight out of the turn of the century marched down the front. On either side of the buttons, a circle, a triangle, and a square were split into precise halves that made Shego want to yell, _Congrats! So you passed fourth-grade geometry!_

Didn't seem to matter to Hego. He stalked from the car in that wide-legged gait that had Shego convinced he really _did_ have a rod up his butt. His fists were balled at his sides when Shego threw herself in front of him. "Uh, hi," she said. "What's our strategy?"

Stare. "Strategy?"

"Yeah, you know. It's that thing we do when we wanna win."

Okay, so that had just sort of slipped out. Not that Shego regretted it or anything. Abandoning sarcasm would've been the first tip-off that something was out of whack here.

Although - when had anything short of a punch in the face _ever_ tipped Hego off to ANYthing?

Right now, that face spread into the I-never-met-a-problem-I-couldn't-idealize-away grin, making it a thousand percent more punchable. "Guys, over here!" he called to the other three, who'd been standing in the back in a flock of brain-blank sheep. Ten seconds later, they were all in one of Hego's infamous huddles.

 _Yeah, might've been great to work this out earlier._

"So, Shego says we need a strategy. Any ideas?" Hego asked in that same perkiness he must've used in the Bueno Nacho board meetings when he was assuring someone there was no such thing as a bad suggestion. Further proof that the guy lived in another world. "I was thinking I'd distract him while the rest of you retrieve the weapon."

Shego surprised herself by not taking out a chunk of that perfect hair. The _this is it; it'll all be over soon_ running smoothly through her head had given her a bizzaro type of patience. Not like she was about to call for a group Kumbaya, but her hands weren't itching to wrap anybody's throat.

Yet.

Her voice was perfectly calm when she said, "Oh, yeah, that's a _great_ idea. Give him our biggest target to shoot at."

Hego's entire body sagged as if she'd just given him a terminal diagnosis. "So. . . you're saying a smaller target?"

"Ding-ding-ding," Shego said, still inflection-free. "And who can be our smallest target, boys?"

" _I_ can." Mego gave his ponytail a smug toss.

"Right again." Shego pointed at the Wegos, who were already beaming at each other. "While he's trying to zap Mego, you guys double until you've got him surrounded. I'll come at him from behind and take it from there."

Hego raised an arm. "What about me?"

Of course. Mr. Go-Anal-Over-the-One-Thing-Going-On-That-He-Ever-Caught. And now she was supposed to find a _job_ for him?

"You just stay. . ." Shego stopped herself from saying _out of the way_ just in time. ". . . in the background in case anything goes wrong. And, hey, we'll need somebody to heft that huge back of money back to the bank, right?"

Hego matched the Wegos beam for beam, which meant he hadn't noticed he'd just been dissed. Shego was totally fine with that.

 _Let's just get this over with._

She'd give her brothers _some_ credit - most of the plan went okay. Mego made full use of his natural obnoxiousness by popping up, waggling his tongue at the Symmetrizer, and then shrinking. While the lame-o villain shot at the speck - and Shego secretly hoped he'd hit - the Wegos slowly multiplied around him, trapping him in a circle of crackling red. Shego launched herself into the biggest gap-between-duplicates that she could find.

Right away, she could tell it wasn't her strongest move. She'd assessed the gap halfheartedly and she'd pulled the landing, reeling her foot back in before it could crunch a Wego's nose - why the heck did _that_ instinct have to click in just now?

She landed two inches from the Symmetrizer. It gave him just enough of an opening to spin around and level his weapon at her.

Shego had already scrambled to all fours, ready to spring away, when someone came down like a missile onto her back, smashing her face-first into the ground. Some two-hundred-pound someone.

And the Symmetrizer was one-fifty soaking wet.

Shego pried herself onto her back and kicked the bulk off her, heaving for air. Her eyes met the concerned blue she never wanted to see again in her _life_.

 _Seriously? You had ONE job, dude._

"Hego?" Shego spat. Rage ripped through her like a knife to the ribs. "What the - he's getting away!"

The mountain of moron didn't budge. "He was about to blast you!"

"It was a stupid laser! He was totally gonna miss - what were you _thinking_?"

Hego's forehead pulled into self-righteous mode again. "I was just trying to protect you."

Shego felt everything inside her seize and die.

"Yeah," she said woodenly. "I know."

The weapon of death Hego had been so concerned about had left a dime-sized hole in the dust. With a harder-than-necessary shove to her biggest brother, Shego took off after the Symmetrizer, since it was obvious no one _else_ was gonna volunteer. Her boots churned up dry Go-City dirt and tossed it behind her as if they couldn't wait to get rid of it.

It didn't take more than five good pumps to pass the Symmetrizer, then tackle him and ride him sidesaddle.

"You are so lame!" Shego cried. She raised a hand and the plasma switched on almost by itself. "First of all, _symmetry_? The only alarm that sets off is my Nerd Alert. We've already got one math-geek villain in this town, and that's one too many. What symmetry crimes would you even pull off? De-symmetrize Brad Pitt's face so he can't get acting jobs anymore? And your weapon doesn't even match your gimmick. It's just a random laser you picked up somewhere. How much more pathetic can you get?"

The Symmetrizer squeaked in response.

Yeah, it hardly even counted as bragging to say she'd be the most impressive thing to ever come out of Go City.

Shego brought her plasma fist down a breath away from the guy's eyebrows. "Listen, pal. I need answers, and you're gonna give me some. Capiche?"

The Symmetrizer nodded, throwing off flickers of _yes-whatever-you-say-just-don't-hurt-me_. It was the only good part of being a superhero anymore.

"Who do you have to visit to become a supervillain?" Shego said. "Who gets you started?"

It took a few seconds for the Symmetrizer to recover his words. He gasped, "Hench. Jack Hench of HenchCo. You can call him at 555-HENCH for his office hours."

 _Hench._

With the name tucked away in the back of her mind, Shego felt her dead-calm returning. She came slowly off the Symmetrizer's shoulders, lifted the bag of money from them onto her own, and pressed her palm flat against one of his cheeks just in case he got any crazy ideas about running. "Thanks. Bye," she said.

There was a cheer from the sidelines, and Shego stopped her neck from snapping back toward her brothers just in time. Dangit - why'd they have to be _watching_? She'd gone over the scene a zillion times in her head, and at this point they were supposed to be distracted in that way they always managed to be when a plan was just begging to be screwed up somehow.

She didn't return the look as she strolled to the car. No doubt Hego would boo-hoo his eyes out, and that would get the twins going. . . and who wanted to see that?

Six months ago, some drop of guilt would've leaked in Shego's chest. But she'd spent way too much time worrying about them and their issues.

"Way to go, Shego!" Hego had to be pumping a fist in the air.

She kept going, gaze directed at their boots. She passed them.

"Uh, Shego?" Mego asked, already whining.

Kept going.

"Shego, what are you _doing_?"

That could've been any of them.

Shego had reached the car by now. She slung the cash-bag into the passenger seat and slapped herself into the driver's, key in the ignition. She could pretty much _hear_ jaws scraping in the dust behind her, and she didn't give a rip.

With a squeal of secondhand tires, Shego peeled out of there - about twenty miles over the speed limit. She'd be four states over before that little band of Superman wannabes even got it together enough to _consider_ coming after her.

The road in front of her yawned up empty. No hitchhikers or construction workers today. Shego was utterly alone.

At last.

* * *

Shego somehow kept her jaw in traction when she pulled into HenchCo's parking lot. Most of Go City's villains had hung out in pretty seedy places, but this joint had _class_.

Perfect.

It was curved around itself into some kind of funky wiggly-sided shape. All glass-fronted as if to say, _I got nothin' to hide!_ It effortlessly straddled the line between garish and dull that EVERYthing in Go City always wound up on one side or the other of.

Shego hoisted the sack of money and strolled into the main lobby with a purpose. The receptionist - a _male_ receptionist, which upped Shego's hopes for a non-chauvinist-pig type - smiled knowingly at her when she flashed the cash, pressed a button on his desk, and told her Jack Hench would be with her shortly.

He was.

Hench actually looked pretty classy himself. Clean-shaven face. Hair graying in a perfect dignified pattern right down his part. Armani suit and Caribbean tan.

Just a _bit_ of a step up from Avairius and Electronique. The guy even _smelled_ of expensive-yet-understated cologne.

His grin, though, was a little too sleazy, as far as Shego was concerned. Sort of like the guys back in school who'd leered at her from across the room from the instant she'd first started wearing a bra. She took a few irritated steps back.

Hench stuck out a hand that Shego didn't bother shaking. "Hello, hello. I'm Jack Hench; welcome to HenchCo. And you are. . .?"

She shifted the money bag. "Shego."

Hench frowned. "That's it?"

"That's all you're gettin' out of me."

The first hint of respect glimmered in Hench's eyes. It felt better than the spa-luxurious massage Shego had treated herself to on the way over here.

Hench curled an arm around her back - which she removed with a filthy look - and ushered her into his just-as-impressive office. He sank with grace into a wingbacked chair and folded his neat corporate hands on the desktop. "So - what brings you here, Shego?"

Shego got tapped by a momentary kid-summoned-to-the-principal's-office feeling, but she planted her feet hip-distance apart the way Club Banana models did. "Why does anyone come here?" she said. "I want to become a villain."

"Of course you do." He pulled open one nick-free desk drawer and slid - _yawn alert!_ \- a business form across to her. "Simply fill out this form and we'll get you all started. We'll need to know your lair size, desired area of conquest, whether you will put in a request for henchmen and if so, how many. . ."

Shego almost snickered at the absurdity of it all. _Lair? Conquest? Henchmen?_ The words were so over-the-top - and so didn't match the image she'd created of her bashing some goody-two-shoes straight into the dirt.

"Okay, see," she butted in, "I don't have any delusions of grandeur myself. World-conquering isn't really my thing. Mostly, I just want to make people miserable."

Hench grinned at her again, used-car-salesman style, only with more tact and less tacky. "I love that in a client," he said, leaning back ever-so-slightly in his chair. "So tell me. What are your credentials?"

Shego didn't even hesitate. "Well, you might've guessed I didn't win this -" another tug on the money sack - "by being the hundred customer of the day. And that _is_ my thing. I'm an expert at infiltration. And once I'm in there, I can nab anyone, sabotage anything, and get outta there without setting off alarms or anything. I can _fight_. I'm not a supergenius, and I don't have a degree _yet_ -" she emphasized that last word, making sure to peak her eyebrows - "but I keep a clear head and I think fast on my feet."

That was something her self-defense teacher had told her during freshman year. Followed by the critique that she was too violent. Like she was supposed to take that as an insult.

Hench nodded as if he were tracking perfectly with her. Nice change of pace. "Well, I think I see the perfect solution to this," he said.

Shego didn't release her eyes from their slits. "And that is - "

"You can hire yourself out."

" _Excuse_ me?"

Hench went almost pale and slipped the chair backward, infuriatingly out of punching distance. "As a sidekick. A mercenary, if you will. Many of my clients have grand ambitions and would love someone to help them out in the physical strength department."

Shego's mind was already _waaaaaay_ ahead of him. "So - he does the crazy scheming and I do the fighting?" she asked.

"Something of that nature, yes." Hench formed church steeples with his fingers and pressed them above his mouth. "I almost hate to ask, but do you have any recommendations? From other villains, perhaps?"

For the first time all interview, Shego had to shake her head.

"Then I'm afraid we will have to test you," Hench said. He gave Shego a sideways, apologetic, uneasy glance. "I have to make sure I'm not providing my clients with inferior backup, of course."

"Of course," Shego spit, instead of, "Let me rearrange your face."

Nah. She wasn't about to waste time getting mad over this. Whatever "test" Hench was gonna give her, she'd blaze through and leave him looking stupid for even wondering.

"You mentioned fighting as a strength," Hench said. "You'll be pitted against one of HenchCo's trained personal bodyguards."

Shego could almost HEAR her own flat thoughts. _Oh, no. Dainty gasp. Swoon. Whatever shall I do?_

Hench snapped his fingers, and a bubble in the ceiling folded open to drop a guy with steroid-quality muscles. The dude immediately struck a laughably fierce pose. Shego would never kiss Jack Hench's feet for anything, but at the moment, she loved him for not making her fight a girl.

"Now, I want you to understand, Miss Shego." Hench's voice was smooth as Shego's newly-salt-scrubbed skin, and he rubbed at his equally-spotless black slacks. "If at any point, you have sustained a serious injury or you feel that you are unable to continue the fight, simply let us know, and we will call it off. We don't want anyone getting hurt on our watch."

Ha. Hench had no _idea_ that she would kill for a chance to be in legit danger for once.

Shego gave him just enough of a nod to indicate she understood before lunging. This time, it was a good lunge - she could feel it straight down to her heels. Big Bozo swung out a fist that Shego saw coming from a mile away and ducked under. While he was still making a pull-back with his other arm - quick, just not quick enough - Shego balanced herself on one leg like a flamingo and drove her knee into his gut with every wiry ounce of herself. Even as hard-packed as the guy was, that had to hurt.

Sure enough, Big Bozo stumbled in place and only caught a moan after one syllable. Shego vaulted herself off his broad back and aimed another kick to his rumpus. Adrenaline charged her veins and sharpened her moves quicker than that dog's miracle vitamin pill in one of Hego's _favorite_ stupid Saturday superhero cartoons. She couldn't have been more at home if that were her nameplate resting on the desk.

Big Bozo propelled himself toward her. Shego swished easily between his legs. When the guy pulled it together enough to come after her with one burly leg out to return the kick, she brought out the edge she'd deliberately forgotten to mention to Hench - her plasma.

You _could_ say that changed the atmosphere in the room. Hench's bronzed face worked back a scream. Bozo's mouth dropped open and he took five or six steps backward, feet fumbling for the ground behind him.

Yeah, this was _so_ pretty much over. It was almost anticlimactic.

Shego's moves didn't even need to be pushed toward slick and dangerous. They rose up just fine on their own as she sliced at the air two inches away from Bozo's sunglasses. He was smart enough to keep backing up and then dumb enough to trip over Hench's dry-clean-only leather couch.

He'd only swung himself partway over the back when Shego took aim with three bolts of plasma. The first one clipped Bozo's head, and he ducked, leaving the next two shots to torch a hole in Hench's upholstery. One that Hench probably didn't even _see_ , considering he'd taken refuge under his desk as if the London Blitz were going on around him.

Coward. Most men were.

She had to hand it to Bozo, though - he wasn't half bad. Only gave Shego about two seconds to prep her body for Round Final, which was about three seconds less than she needed.

His blow landed on her shoulder. Pain went off like a bomb, but Shego was back up almost before she'd hit the carpet in the first place. No way was she gonna hand out coupons for free regroup time.

Shego's heel caught the dude square in the pecs. In the space of a flinch, she'd grabbed his arm, twisted it almost upside-down behind his back, and hissed into his ear, "Say uncle."

"Uncle," Bozo said. He wasn't a Grade-A wuss like the Symmetrizer - no squeaking here - but he probably woulda said "My mama's a bum" if she'd told him to. Arm locks equaled major pain.

Shego dropped her grip and pushed him away from her. He slunk out of the room with the breath and pride all knocked out of him.

A slow clap began as Hench untucked himself from under his desk and immediately went to work ironing the corporate smooth back into place. "Well, well, that was _quite_ the display, Miss Shego. I'm impressed," he said.

Shego nodded to him as if she appreciated it - when in _reality_ , it was all she could do not to cry, "Duh!" It was her first fight without her brothers breathing down her neck. How could she NOT have won?

Hench reached into the pristine crease of his shirt pocket. "I'll get you some names."

Now _that_ she appreciated.

* * *

 _Duff Killigan_  
 _Professor Dementor_  
 _Frugal Lucre_  
 _Falsetto Jones_  
 _Gemini_  
 _White Stripe_  
 _Dr. Drakken_

Shego ran her eyes down the list for what had to be the thirtieth time. What was she expecting, a new name to magically appear at the end of it? Or for everything that had been holed up inside her for-practically-ever to shoot out and tear it to shreds?

It was weird, the peace in the hotel game-room/lobby. Shego wasn't used to a room outta range of poser-superhero speeches right outside the door and the headache-inducing bang of rowdy feet on the steps.

But she hadn't had to reach for the Advil at all this evening. She could even hear the stinkin' under-the-window AC cranking on. It was a strange sound to relish.

Shego turned her attention back to the fingerprint-smudged desktop screen in front of her, moving her mouse over to "Sign up for correspondence classes." Hey, she wasn't about to let a straight-A senior year and the resulting tiny chip of a scholarship go to waste. And she needed something to far back on in case this whole supervillain gig turned out to be a dud - she was _so_ not gonna play the prodigal sister and come crawling back to Go Tower.

The thought instinctively stiffened the hairs on the back of Shego's neck. What were Hego and his merry band of losers doing right now? It was absolutely delish to picture them having to make the fifteen-mile hike back home and have everyone blame everyone else for it.

Then what, though? Would they call Go City's useless cops on her or show up at the door of Room 315 to inform her she was grounded for life?

 _News flash, dude: Sharing some of your DNA is punishment enough!_

Shego grunted. Hego had basically had all of, like, two thoughts in his entire twenty-four years on the planet: _Protect family_ and _Fight evil_. Now that family _was_ evil, how would he even know what to do with himself? Maybe he'd just explode the way those sci-fi robots did when their programming didn't have the brains to sort out a paradox like that.

That'd be awfully satisfying.

Shego entered her address as "In transit" and spun down to the next question - _What is your desired major?_ Scrolling past Archeology and Biology, she slapped a check mark next to Child Development. After a disgustingly long grinding session, the computer seemed to accept that and reassured her she'd be getting a follow-up e-mail any day now.

And just for a moment, the anger was a no-show.

The silence when she got back to Room 315 was even weirder. Hego was as much the Master of Bedtime as he was Master of Everything Else Nobody Gave A Fig About, and he totally had this whole "Good night, Shego," "Good night, Hego," "Good night, Mego," "Good night, Hego," _ad nauseam_ routine made up.

 _How can he be my brother? He HAD to have been adopted off the set of The Waltons or something._

Shego shook her hair back and settled herself onto the edge of her queen-size bed. For all her trash talk - that her brothers so richly deserved - she didn't _especially_ want them to wander outside the next morning and get nailed by mail trucks. With any luck, she'd just never have to see them or any of their negative-two-on-the-scare-scale villains ever again.

 _Enjoy your lives, guys,_ Shego thought, surprised and bitter that the irony wasn't quite firing on all cylinders. _They're sure gonna be a heck of a lot easier now. Everything can be black and white again. Ya happy now?_

She took the list back out of her leg pouch and ran her finger down the names again.

 _Mercenary_. Shego had already decided she super-preferred that to _sidekick_. She associated _that_ word with goofy klutzes on those TV sitcoms she could barely stand. The comic relief.

Fat chance. She was trying to get _out_ of the clown business. _Mercenary_ sounded like someone who actually got to get their hands dirty.

Who didn't get smacked down by an armload of rules.

Shego's lips curved into a secret smile, and she fell back across the sheets, basking in the silence from every direction.


	12. Plant Manager

**~Sorry it's been so long, everyone! Here's my latest. :)**

 **The occasional non-word is meant to capture Drakken's "voice." And, yes, I stole the title from a Darkwing Duck joke. Child of the '90s, here.~**

Ah, now _this_ is how October should be.

Bright. Sunny. Sky to match his blue. Air as crisp as the first bite into a fresh apple.

It is the type of day that Dr. Drakken relishes, the type he's almost surprised doesn't come, well, daily ever since his pardon and reformation. He _does_ know there's absolutely no correlation between your mood and the day's forecast (although the converse can be true - the weather can affect your mood). The world just seems so much more gleeful that clouds on the horizon appear out of place.

There are still clouds in Drakken's life, of course. He still gets stuck in long lines at the bank, still has to endure Will Du's mean-eyed squint in the halls of Global Justice. But there is something solid and non-squirmy inside him, something that will turn back into happiness and win out if he will only give it a chance.

His only semi-scientific theory is that the Lorwardians stored some sort of happy gas in their attack pods, and it was released when they burst - because the healing _did_ seem to increase with every pod that hit the ground. Would have to be some pretty strong stuff to have not worn off after four months, though.

At any rate, it is a Perfect Day for a catch-up hike with his very best friend and two other people who have serious grounds to hate their guts. . . and yet don't anymore, as far as Drakken knows.

Still, knots pile in Drakken's chest, one atop the other, as he and Shego approach Kim Possible and her boyfriend - Ron Something-Or-Other - as they stand waiting on the Middleton Community Park's official hiking trail. It has only been four quick, fragile months. Not long enough to wean himself off his maniacal laugh or his general selfishness, so Drakken imagines Kim Possible still has the instinct to kick his teeth in.

He needn't have worried. (Drakken loves that word, _needn't_.) When they spot him, Ron grins so wide he could inhale a papaya, and Kim Possible's lips tilt up fractionally at the corners. The tilt is slight, uncertain in its newness, but it's positive nonetheless.

The stack of worries topples over and turns to powder.

It is, perhaps, a haphazard peace - an inequality rather than an equation, to speak in algebraic terms - yet they are still lightyears away from where they were the first hour of the Lorwardian invasion. (Maybe literally _lightyears_ , since they'd been abducted into outer space, though Drakken doubts they were far enough outside of the Earth's atmosphere to be measured in lightyears.)

"Hi, Drakken. Hi, Shego," Kim Possible says. She does politeness so well, no one would ever guess what a _sass_ she can be!

"Hey, Prin -" Shego aborts her typical greeting after one syllable and teeters on the edge of one of her few uncomfortable silences.

Kim Possible doesn't smile, not then. Her eyes, however, relax, and Drakken's stomach with them. Her eyes have always reminded him of green-apple-flavored Jolly Ranchers ("always" here referring to the period since they made peace). When they fixate on you and narrow, you clench up, knowing you're in for what the teenagers today refer to as a "tail-whoopin'."

"So" - Shego doesn't let herself dwell in the awkwardness for long - "how are things in the land of books and cooks?"

It is the friendliest Drakken has seen Kim Possible's face directed at Shego. "They're pretty spankin'," she says. "All the professors are _super_ nice. Well, most of them. I can't wait to get out of Gen Ed and not have to deal with my history prof anymore. He has this voice like a tornado siren, and everything he tells you about is just a series of events. He doesn't personalize it at all, and it tanks because this could be really exciting stuff. . ."

 _Okay - yes - this is all quite fascinating, but can we talk about it while_ moving _?_ The day is a burning blob of intensity, and Drakken's legs are cramping from not being in the midst of it. He bounds up and down on his heels as if he has to go to the bathroom (which he doesn't - he took care of that before they left, seeing as how there's no indoor plumbing in the woods).

Must have grunted a couple of anxious grunts, too, because Kim Possible laughs and gives him a permissive nod. Satisfied with that, Drakken charges ahead, displaced leaves snapping under the soles of the sturdy brown hiking boots that make him feel like a rugged outdoorsman. The wind whips at his face - a pleasant wind, not the kind that pierces like teeth as it will in the winter.

Everything is so colorful and glorious, sizzling fiery against the plain gray of the trail, that Drakken's head isn't sure which way to turn first. The departing chlorophyll is draining the leaves to the brilliantest (is that a word?) medley of colors known to humanity. Some still clinging to green. Some flaming orange-reds, brighter than Kim Possible's hair. Some calmer yellows. Some bordering on purple. Some all different colors, in bands, like three-flavor Popsicles. Some that he can only describe as _mahogany_ -hued - which is ironic, since that's not the variety of wood the tree will produce if cut down. Ever since he's mastered his plant powers, Drakken has been able to tell a cedar from a fir and a sunflower from a coneflower.

All right, so maybe _mastered_ is too strong a term. The vines respond to Drakken's commands. Unfortunately, they also respond even more promptly to the desires buried deep down in his subconscious, which means he's had to hold them back from clocking many a rude person at the grocery store. And he has very little control over the sweeping-up embraces they will perform at the slightest drop of affection.

At least he's getting a little better about not popping petals from his neck anymore. Kim Possible says it's "part of his charm" - Drakken can never tell when she's being sarcastic or not - but it can get really awkward standing in line at said grocery store.

Trouble is, his nerves are still in control, and they're the type to easily panic and throw out alarm bells. Shego's told him that it'll become more of a conscious thing later, and Drakken believes her, because she has accidental powers of her own. For now, though, he's stuck morphing into a marigold whenever someone brushes a little too close to him.

He finally settles on a slow, panoptic scan across his immediate surroundings and then back over his shoulder to ensure the others are following. He doesn't want to enjoy this beautiful day _alone_.

Kim Possible and Shego are, sure enough, moving toward him, even though they're poking along at slower speeds than a certain little puppy in the Little Golden Books Mother used to read him. How does the autumn splendor not put springs on their heels?

Sneaker-slapping steps pound on the path beside him, though, and Drakken turns to see the buff - errr, _Ron_ \- has already caught up with him. The kid is much faster than him; those long legs have many inches on Drakken's. (He could almost even say a foot, but that makes it sound as though the kid has sprouted a third foot, which would probably just slow someone down more than anything.)

"So how's reformation been treatin' ya?" Ron asks.

"Oh, splendid, splendid!" Drakken says automatically. "I actually _sleep_ now. Can you believe it?"

"Yeah, I can tell. You don't look quite as" - Ron yanks the areas beneath his eyes into sickly pouches, leaving the whites runny and exposed - "blaaaaaghhhhhh."

Drakken nods. "Nicely put."

He doesn't feel quite as blaaaaaghhhhhh, either.

There's an expectant pause. Several blinks pass before Drakken realizes it is now his turn to express interest.

He coughs the boom back into his voice. "And how are your culinary classes?" he says, mouth beginning to water at even a roundabout mention of food.

Ron lights up, all the way into the freckles. "Those are _sweet_! Pun intended. My guac was voted Most Munchable, and the head chef says my desserts are 'little mouthfuls of heaven'. I guess Mr. B. was right about _some_ thing."

"Mr. B.?" Drakken repeats.

"Mr. Barkin. He taught our Home Ec sophomore year."

The image pushes to the forefront of Drakken's mind, the very definition of square impatience and demands chiseled across his wide forehead. "Franklin Barkin?" he says. "I didn't know he still taught there!"

"Ohho. No." Ron's shaking his head with a sudden all-knowing air. "No, this is his son. Steve. Franklin works at that town by the beach where they churn their own butter and don't use Wi-Fi?" He drops to a whisper that still rockets straight up into the treetops. "I'm not sure they know the Revolutionary War's over."

An icy sensation grips the base of Drakken's tongue. He remembers very little about that resort, and that's more than he cares to.

He chooses to veer to another subject. "And they let you bring the ver - mole rat?" It's Drakken's turn to backpedal, to squelch _vermin_ before it comes out. After all, they have several rats in the labs at Global Justice, and they're perfectly nice. Granted, they've also all got fur, which makes them infinitely more approachable. . .

"Oh, yeah. Lucky for me, the head chef's seen _Ratatouille_ about a hundred and fifty times, so he's a pretty open-minded guy." Ron pats the rodent-sized lump in his khaki pocket. "The Ruf-Meister's just gotta wash his paws like the rest of us."

The Ruf-Meister? Where does this child get all these nicknames? He displays an even greater affinity for them than Eddy does -

Drakken's meandering thought process is cut off by the most wondrous pile of leaves just a step or two off the trail, bathed in sunlight that bounces down crookedly and illuminates in every color of the rainbow, minus blue and indigo.

Which Drakken easily fills with his skin and his lab coat as he throws his entire body into the pile. Leaves scatter from his outstretched arms and crinkle under his bent knees, sticking in his hair, his eyebrow, his eye _lashes_ , even! They cushion his chest-first fall to the ground beneath them and he chuckles, blowing puffs of dirt and dying grass away.

And even the tall tree-shadows that once so ominously suited his villainous demeanor circle around him, sheltering him better than any band of HenchCo-certified men.

(Even _before_ you took into account that all of Hench's guys hated his guts.)

Ron, on the other hand, cannonballs in right after Drakken, setting up a "Boo-yah!" that sends several of the birds who have decided to stick around for the winter cawing away. It makes Drakken feel like laughing, so he does. It's good for his vocal cords' self-esteem - if vocal cords can have such a thing - to know they are not limited to sinister cackling.

Drakken gets to his feet and says, "You know, this is the forty-third autumn I've lived through." His back hitches, punctuating that statement. "Well, only about the fortieth that I _remember_. And yet every year, it astonishes me. As if I've forgotten how - magical it can be! Only it's not magic - it's _science_! People think science is all dull and boring, but look!" He spreads his arms wide to indicate the vibrancy around them. "Chemical reactions did all this! Isn't it grand?"

Ron nods, his eyes unexpectedly sage. "Dude, that was totally inspiring. You don't haveta stop bein' a kid just because you're getting old. . . er."

Drakken permits only a momentary scowl; he's not fond of being reminded that he's far older than his spirit feels, which is currently about age six. And yet the boy's smile extends friendship like a sample of one of his desserts from heaven. That alone would have been enough reason for Drakken to switch sides, with or without his developing conscience.

Someone _liking_ **him**. . . for him? That's been batted back at him so many times, Drakken came to consider it just short of splitting the atom: a tasking job, even for the most determined and intellectual of scientists.

That marvelous fact hits Drakken's veins in what his off-the-heezy book of off-the-heezy slang defines as a "buzz." He darts around, heart _clip-clopp_ ing like hoofbeats, before gathering as many of the golden-orange leaves as he can and tossing them up for the sheer pleasure of watching them rain down into his face and bounce off his cheekbones.

Ron fills his own arms and pitches the contents skywards as well. Even the mole rat throws a leaf or two.

And for a moment, there is no Hench lurking in the background despising him for taking away his customers. There's only the bliss of fresh air and woodsy leaves and being with once-enemies who are now. . .

. . . friends?

Drakken cocks his head to ponder this, plucking a stray leaf from his ponytail in the process. Well, yes, he'd go with that for Ron.

Kim Possible, however, is another story. She's been a thorn in his side for so long - and, on her end, she has all those memories of all those times he locked her in doom traps that were _supposed_ to be one-hundred-percent foolproof. She's a kind soul, kinder than most, but she's still only human.

(Hard as that is to believe sometimes, Drakken knows it's true, because he once retrieved samples of her DNA. And if he hadn't gotten lazy and made such slipshod clones who couldn't stand up to soft drinks, it could've worked . . . but what does any of that matter now?)

A leaf lands smack in the middle of Ron's nose. The kid goes cross-eyed trying to see it. Drakken hangs over himself in the middle and lets out the farthest thing from an evil cackle.

Speaking of Kim Possible, she and Shego are _finally_ rounding the bend, and they appear to still be talking about college "profs."

"I did all my classes correspondence," Shego's saying, "so I never had a professor I couldn't hang up on." Her shoulders twitch with a silent snicker. "Thank goodness, or that coulda been _ugly_."

"So _that_ 's how you have a degree." Kim Possible's gaze comes to land on Drakken. It's not sparking with the holding-back of insults.

Still, Drakken is nervous in her tidy presence. He squirms as if his lack of a college degree has turned his clothes see-through.

A quick glance down reassures him they haven't. Drakken spends a great deal more concentration than is likely required brushing off the seat of his pants and checking his shoelaces, feeling the area on his chest where the medal would rest, and then he follows Ron back to the ladies.

"I haven't decided where I'm going to go after grad," Kim Possible says now. "You'd think I would. I've been getting offers from everyone from the Middleton PD to the Canadian Mounties since _before_ freshman year." Her eyes roll without a drop of the self-importance Drakken once found so incredibly irritating.

Drakken fastens his own eyes straight on the horizon. He and his maybe-friends are coming up on the pond now, a gorgeous little oval partially hidden between trees. Cattails wave in the breeze like. . . well, like cat's tails. The pond matches the sky's perfection so intensely, Drakken would swear that the sky fell and left an imprint - if he weren't aware of gravity and the reflective properties of water. He wishes to examine it more closely.

All right, all right, and he also wishes to leave this particular conversation behind. All right, so he envies Kim Possible the youth he squandered on crazed plots.

And envy can be a frightful thing in the hands of a mad scientist.

Still, Canada - that'd be a nice place to work. High literacy rates. Great healthcare. Sparkling clean cities.

Drakken begins to feel benevolent again. He actually winds up giving the pond a wide berth, because it's swarmed with geese that can be as cranky as if they have Moodulators stuck on their necks and constantly cranked to Angry. (Drakken hasn't ever checked to see if they do. That would just get them even crankier.)

The leaves that haven't left home yet blur into a nature collage as Drakken jogs ahead - well, okay, skitters - it's hard to get good mileage with these shrimped-up little legs. Or some car metaphor - Eddy would know -

Stop! Log. Heels in dirt. Muddle in mind slowly clearing.

Drakken steps gingerly - _not_ daintily; it's impossible in these lumberjack shoes - over it and whips back around to warn the others to watch their steps, like a brave guide scouting ahead for danger. All three of them (four if you count the mole rat in Ron's pocket) dodge around it. Despite the snarky tweak to Shego's lips, Drakken is secure in the knowledge that he saved them.

And then Kim Possible's voice reaches him. "The one I'm really serious about is Global Justice. I mean, Dr. Director's already said she'd love to have me, and she's about the most amazing person I know. I'd love to follow in her footsteps someday."

Blotches return, only they're cold instead of hot, probably white instead of pink. Drakken takes off at an even-faster skitter so no one can see them and question why he suddenly seems on the verge of collapse.

Global Justice!? _His_ Global Justice? Where he's already one of the top scientists? And Dr. Director, who's always oh-so-appreciative of his work? She could - she could - what if she appreciates Kim Possible more? The girl who _can_ do anything. . .

 _Good grief!_ the left hemisphere of Drakken's brain cries. _You sound like a kindergartner._

The right hemisphere doesn't reply in words. That's never its forte when it panics this way. It merely paints a picture, vivid as the autumn colors, of Kim Possible appearing before Dr. Director with her college degree and her karate-chop skills, and without a criminal record or a learning disability in sight.

 _It's never been an issue before! Why would it become one_ now _? Good grief!_ Drakken has never noticed how much his brain's left half sounds like Charlie Brown. (A touch more optimistic, perhaps.)

But he and Kim Possible - even the night of the alien invasion - they no longer hate each other - but they'll clash if they work together. Worse, if she ever outranks him -

He takes another bend a little too fast, and that's when he loses control. His left foot skids on tractionless dirt, his legs flail without support, and he tips off the path. . . . and keeps going, skidding straight into a clump of three-six-nine leaves that he smashes and drags along with him.

Branches slap him in the face until Drakken thinks to curl over himself in a ball to protect his cheeks. Unfortunately, his globular shape makes it even easier for him to roll all the way to the bottom of the hill, which must have grown into a mountain sometime when he wasn't looking.

It must take days and days before he finally rocks to a halt. Everything is gnarled and twisted over itself, waiting for pain to show up. Drakken holds his breath and prays it won't be too bad.

Three pairs of feet scurry toward him. Drakken manages a small internal grin when he realizes Shego isn't out for a casual stroll anymore.

Matter of fact, she's the first one to squat beside him and poke his shoulder like she expects it to crack under her touch. "Dr. D? The heck? You all right?" Shego says.

"This is why we look where we're going, dude," Ron said with great solemnity.

See, he _is_ getting better! Four months ago, he'd have responded to that with a blast from a doom ray.

Drakken slowly unwinds his legs from around each other and rotates his hips back to the ground. Bubbles of fluid pop and he gasps in relief. Bones creak but they'd be screaming much louder if any were broken. He must have taken the brunt of it with his knuckles, which are sore even through his gloves.

Switching himself over into scientific mode so he won't begin to shake, Drakken does a quick scan for blood and another for unnatural bumps. There's a scratch on his neck where a twig got him. Something on his kneecap he can tell will be a bruise in another few days. Nothing significant, though.

The frantic worry crumbles like an Oreo dunked in a glass of milk. ( _Mmmm_. . . .)

"Yes," Drakken says, peeling a vine from his collar, taking a second to verify it's not one that's actually attached to him. "By all accounts, I seem to be alive and well."

And his petals take that as their cue to sprout.

Terrific.

Everyone else freezes, as if it's _not_ a beautiful October day, as if a stiff wind has just blown winter in over them. _Uh-oh_ flies onto expressions.

"What is it?" Drakken says.

Ron points - mutely - at the cluster of leaves Drakken just unwound and let fall to the ground.

Drakken glances down at it and plunges into some deep pit of his own _uh-oh._ The leaves remain fall-defying green and are grouped in threes. And it's far too large to be clover.

He recognizes this plant. Would've recognized it even before he became something of an expert on the local plant life.

It's poison ivy.

Drakken startles backward and stumbles over another strand of the toxic foliage that's snared his legs. He scoots across browning grass on his rear, giving his legs seizure-worthy shakes.

And then he finds a little pocket of peace and inhales it greedily. You don't break out in a rash just by touching a leaf - even _his_ body isn't _that_ picky. You have to break the stems, release the oils -

The peace lasts all of two seconds (which is not very long). The sprig of ivy now resting on the ground betrays a sharp snap-off from whatever it was growing on. Oozy stuff saps - sappy stuff oozes from the rip. Drakken can feel more of the same making a sticky trail parallel to his scar.

Oh.

"Doodles!" Drakken cries - _sorry, Mother_. He waits for the agony to blister his (admittedly delicate) skin. It's going to happen, it's going to itch like a bite from a vulture-sized mosquito, and he'll scratch it even though he's not supposed to, and it'll get infected, and he'll have to visit a dermatologist, who will only be able to freak out over the fact that Drakken's blue, and prescribe a dozen cleansing scrubs that will never work. . .

Instead, what he experiences is so unrelated it can't even be called the exact opposite. A suction, a slurping, milkshake through a straw as his pores accept the oil right down into them.

It must be visible, because Ron's eyeballs nearly spring from their sockets. Even Kim Possible's and Shego's normally calm faces are exchanging looks that say, _Holy crow - what is this?_

Drakken points to the no-longer-affected area. "So - that wasn't just me, then?"

Three heads shake in almost perfect synchronization.

"It just. . . soaked up." He hears the tremor of awe in his own voice. "Like a sponge or something."

Sure enough, the oil that was glistening on his skin only seconds before is gone, and not a scrap of his skin feels itchy. Not that he's not appreciative, but - uh - what just happened?

For lack of anything else to do, Drakken turns his attention to removing those darn petals. The one hanging right under his chin comes off first - it's the worst culprit, tickle-wise. Drakken stares at its glossy golden surface as surprising strength flushes his veins.

 _Hmm. . ._

"You think you can finish the walk, Dr. D?" The pucker between Shego's brows is relaxing to make way for something snappy.

He nods at her. "Yes, of course! Bring it!"

That's teen slang for _I'm not afraid_ , and he isn't.

Actually, he feels nearly as good as he's ever felt.

* * *

Superhuman abilities would probably be too much to ask for, Drakken decides later. Long-armed and spindly-legged, he'll never leap tall buildings in a single bound. Even if he managed to giantize himself, he'd probably trip over Paris and have to sit down straight on the point of the Eiffel Tower, which would be so much worse than that pinecone he sat on once.

No, it is enough to have his normal, gleeful supply of energy. He skitter-sprints ahead, yelling back over his shoulder for the others to hurry and check out the amazing trees around every bend. Wonders aloud why human beings' hair doesn't put on a show this magnificent before _it_ loses all _its_ color and falls off. Navigates by watching the sun move from east to west and noting the moss on the north side of the trees, even though this path is well-worn and boasts trail markers at random intervals.

One can never be too prepared, mentally speaking.

And by the time they've completed the loop, Drakken doesn't have so much as a pimple to show for what Shego's dubbed his "face-plant into poison ivy."

"I just can't understand it," Drakken says as Kim Possible checks in on her website with her computer kid. He stamps the feet that are getting colder with the sun's westward movement. "I've fallen into poison ivy before" -

Shego adds an unnecessary snort.

" - and it _always_ affects me straightaway! Really bad, too." Drakken shudders. "Big, nasty itchy rash of -"

"Okay, that's enough!" Shego brings out her snappy and braces both hands over her ears. Ron is matching her green for green, so Drakken very kindly lets the matter drop.

"I have a theory," says someone on the cusp of adolescence.

Drakken startles at the sound rising from Kim Possible's wristband. He's still not used to it, not after her almost-three years of lugging around a contraption as big as his old Gameboy. He's also not used to getting anything but grief from the kids on either end.

"But I'll need to test it," the kid - Drakken thinks his name might be Wade - continues.

Drakken can almost feel his own ears pricking up, the way Commodore Puddles' do when he hears someone say "treat."

 _Theory? Test? Oh, yes, please!_

He's at Kim Possible's side so fast any normal teen wouldn't have time to jostle over and make room for him. "How can I help?" he blurts, forgetting to pause between words.

Wade folds his fingers over his keyboard. "I'll need a blood sample."

Drakken bites down hard on his lower lip.

"Not a big thing." Wade almost sounds like he's trying to reassure him. "Just one little drop oughta do it. If you're comfortable."

It's not a dare, not coming in that softened tone, and yet Drakken views refusing as backing down. This is for the sake of _science_ , after all.

 _The science of ME. And - I'll right, I won't lie. I still rather like me._

Drakken's fingertips explore the loose fabric around his elbows, trace up and down his forearm, wiggle and tap against each other. Finally, after much calming oxygen and a few pep talks from his eager flowers, he nods.

The preparation is more nauseating than the actual event. A small tray slides out from the side of Kim Possible's wristband, and an even smaller pin's sharpness sparkles in the waning daylight. Drakken, heart in his mouth, slowly slides off his right glove and - _don't think about it, don't think about, don't think about it!_ \- presents it for pricking.

A quiet, quick puncture - clean pain - and then his finger is freed, more tingly than anything else. A tiny drop of blood comes out, and Drakken sucks in his breath. Horror is overcome by fascination, however, when he catches the distinct scent of something that his nasal passages could mistake for Mother's perfume.

Is that _him_?

Drakken glances around at the trail. Only a few weedy things are struggling to poke up through cracks in the hard-packed dirt. It's too late for there to be many flowers. . .

He presses his fingertip firmly against the plate-tray, leaving behind a perfect round drop of those panic-red cells. It helps to remember that the liquid itself is clear, helps to concentrate on how quickly platelets will heal a prick this small.

The tray slides back inside, and Wade says, "Great! This is just what I needed. Thanks a lot, Drakken."

Drakken's chest puffs of its own volition. "Anytime. Anything for science, my dear child."

Wade hangs up quickly, almost as if he's about to give into the laughter Shego _could_ be muffling against the back of a park bench. . . but isn't.

Drakken sprawls lengthwise across another bench and begins a deep sigh. One that nearly turns into a scream when Kim Possible's green eyes squat down level with his.

"Well," she says, "you sure took off when I mentioned Global Justice."

Drakken knows he's blotching furiously.

Kim Possible treats him to a teasing smile. Teasing - yet not mocking. "Would it really be that bad to work with me?" she says.

"It's not that! You're just - so - you can do anything, and Dr. Director will like you better than anyone else!" Good grief again; is that a _whine_ that just crawled out of him?

Judging from how Kim Possible's face cringes, it probably is. But she doesn't use her talking-Drakken-down-from-a-tantrum voice when she tells him, "Look, when I join GJ, _if_ I join GJ, I'll be an agent, not a scientist. We'll have totally different jobs to do, so there won't be any lame competition or anything."

 _Lame_ is the perfect word for how it wobbles there, right out in the open, unable to stand, let alone walk. Any follow-up jealousy is equally lame, although it won't quite let go of Drakken, either.

Kim Possible's hair-flounce is the first one Drakken's seen that doesn't stoke that flare. "And I _know_ Dr. Director doesn't like her agents better than her scientists," she says. Her hair bounces around her waist again. "That'd be way unprofessional and, like I said earlier, she's one of the coolest people I know."

The very air seems to lighten. Drakken himself goes limp against the bench like one of those stress toys emptied of its inner gel. That happened to more than a few of his back in his villain days.

* * *

It's another twelve golden minutes, the pinprick-throb in Drakken's finger the only downside, before Kim Possible's wrist-a-ma-bob dweedles for her attention.

She presses a button on the side and marches out, "Go, Wade." Drakken stands behind her, peering over her, rocking on the balls of his feet because this thing is intriguingly high-tech and they're solving a scientific mystery - and because he's just plain happy.

"I've been running some tests on Drakken's cells," says the child called Wade. "Here, take a look at this."

A hyper-magnified picture of a vague red orb appears on the screen.

Ooh, _cells_! Ripples run through Drakken's pulse. This is a microscopic piece of himself, and the sight is as invigorating as those caramel lattes he loves.

And yet something about it is strange, foreign although it came from his own body. He can't quite work out what. . . are the sides thicker?

Wade taps one, as if to confirm Drakken's wonderings. "What you're looking at right here? That's the cell wall."

"Cell _wall_?" Drakken cries. "But animal cells don't _have_ cell walls! Only -" His voice screeches six keys up and then plows to a stop.

 _Plants. Only_ plants _do!_

Drakken's entire cranium begins to ring like the Notre Dame bells in that Quasimodo movie. He always related to the kid - even if he was blue rather than hunchbacked. The stares, the whispers, the curled lips must all be the same.

At any rate, the chime in Drakken's head lasts and lasts, dying down just as he hears Wade say, ". . . presence of chloroplasts in the plasma."

Ron shoots straight up on the bench. "Okay, even _I_ know people aren't supposed to have those!"

Drakken's intent on Wade now, squinting and waiting to scrutinize, loath to miss out on a great scientific breakthrough that he literally gave his very blood for.

"So far my evidence suggests - and you can double-check this for yourself, Drakken," Wade says, bobbing his curls politely in Drakken's direction, "that Drakken couldn't get poison ivy because his cells are now part plant."

"And poison ivy can't give poison ivy to other plants." The thought is released before Drakken is even aware that he's pieced it together. If he'd known it was coming out, he would have taken some extra time to smooth the crinkles from it.

"Bingo." Wade flicks a finger.

Drakken drops down onto the bench beside Ron, a drop so heavy he's surprised he doesn't rip the bench straight off its. . . hinges? Anchors? What do you call those things that hold a bench to the ground below it?

Whatever. He's more than a little distracted by the news that he is apparently now related to the trees putting on a stunning finale for the year and to the poison ivy that won't be his mortal enemy anymore. He can't even kiss the rash goodbye, because it's nowhere to be found - and who kisses rashes, anyway? Yuck.

That's why he sprouts those petals. Which, admittedly, aren't much of a power, but they can make a great icebreaker. (Saved him and Shego from having to discuss their almost-hug back on the Lorwardian ship, anyway.) That's why he can unwind vines from his neck. That's why they have a psychological connection so deep Drakken doesn't even need to depend on his words, which can be notoriously. . .

See, there's the perfect example right there. Independable? Undependable? He knows it's not _independent_. . . you could maybe just sidestep the whole thing and say _less than dependable_. . .

Drakken studies his still-gloveless hand, staring at the needlepoint hole on his index fingertip. Somewhere deep down in there, past the forever-stained layers of epidermis and dermis, all the way into his bone marrow, another substance has invaded and changed the course of his life.

"So - that means - I'm a mutant?" Drakken asks.

Wade's eyes flinch shut. "Well, technically, yeah."

There's a long, wary silence.

Which is broken when Drakken comes up off the bench, throws both fists into the air, and hollers, "YESSSSSSSSSS! I've always _wanted_ to be a mutant!"

Silence reigns for another fifteen seconds, after which Kim Possible bursts into the type of laughter Drakken can never pull off without spitting all over the place. Wade stifles his by diving behind his computer screen. Ron doesn't bother and spews out a howl, and Shego joins in with her surprising squeaks.

Drakken doesn't know what they're laughing about exactly, but he laughs, too. Dancing his shoulders against the pads that no longer feel quite necessary. Exposing his teeth to the wind.

Looking at the colorful band of trees but seeing only himself on the cover of a comic book, the epitome of superpowered heroism, even if he _is_ wearing a ring of petals.

No, actually. . . no, those could come in handy, too. Drakken sits right down in the middle of the path, criss-cross applesauce, to plan his strategy. The petals can come out, and the bad guys - he pictures a hundred clones of Professor Dementor; scary concept - will devolve so deeply into mockery that they'll never notice his army of vines coming straight for them.

"So it's a good thing I'm not a villain anymore," Drakken says. "Why, I might need to photosynthesize, right? And to do that, I'll need sunlight! And villains' lairs have to be ominously dark by their very definition!" He chortles joyously, without a hint of maniac-dom. "See, it all _does_ work out for the best!"

Shego's giggle has wound down into a semi-grunt. "I love how that makes perfect sense to you, Doc."

 _I do, too._

"Well, obviously the chloroplasts are too widely scattered to change your color any," Wade says, scrolling his mouse through the glowing information reflected on his face. "I haven't finished running _all_ the data yet, but you just might feel a little perkier if you stand in sunlight for a while."

"Lovely!" Drakken declares.

See, he was right. Sunlight _does_ aid a happy day along.

With a sigh, Drakken rests his elbows on his knees, his chin on his palms, his cheeks on his fingers. He has mutant powers now, same as Spider-Man. His inner eight-year-old is finally at peace.

After years and years of searching and striving and hurting, the hopes from so long ago have clicked into place. He's _done_ it.

And his ego's too busy collapsing with relief to swell again.

* * *

There _is_ a nightmare that night, despite what a good day it's been. Your standard spiders-up-the-pants. Something from the shallow end of the fear-pool.

Still, Drakken has to admit, it takes him many seconds and many crazy shakes of his pajama legs to convince himself that there aren't any arachnids swarming up from his toes to nip his thighs.

Not until he's settled back into bed, Sir Fuzzymuffin the Second tucked in the crook of his arm to ease the night, does Drakken realize his petals have sprouted. Just the two vertical opposites - top of head and bottom of chin - which he resolves to take as a sign of more control.

Something tickles at the side of his neck, and Drakken bats it away, hands slapping at twenty miles an hour, by impulse. His mind is still crawling with the suggestion of black widows.

And then he recognizes it. The familiar push of his vines. The characteristic strain when they're attempting to grow a variety of flower they've never summoned before, as if a blister is bubbling somewhere inside.

Drakken sits back, head against the headboard, and works on slackening his muscles so the vine can ooze out steady and healthy. It takes slightly more effort than calculating what a laser's trajectory would be in outer space.

At long last, the blister pops and a new something brushes against Drakken's face. It's not a flower, though. No petals, just leaves.

Poison ivy.

It stands conspicuous and brag-worthy, acquired on today's hike like a secret ability in a video game. Drakken rustles it back and forth for a moment - it's strangely calming - before sending the little guy back inside his pores to nap 'till morning.

And then chuckles, a touch hysterically, into his pillow. It's two o'clock in the morning, and he just grew poison ivy. Oh, the possibilities. . . the tempting possibilities. . .

 _I must never use this power for evil,_ Drakken vows before rolling onto his other side and straight into sleep.

 **~And, of course, "I rather like me" being from _Dimension Twist_.~**


	13. Keeping Score

**~This'll probably be my last update before the New Year. Hope everyone has a Merry Christmas and a happy holiday season!~**

 _Calm. Calm. I am calm. I am caaaaaaalllllm. Peaceful. Relaxed. There is no stress. There is no tension. There is nothing but -_

 _What's that thing called? Serenity?_

Dr. Drakken tucks his hands under his knees to conceal the trembling.

There should be something different about their tremor today, he thinks. Something to show that it stems from exhilaration and not the pure terror of staring down the barrel of a pair of handcuffs. Well, handcuffs don't have barrels, but it was the best metaphor he could come up with. (Cops don't really draw their guns nearly as often as they do on TV.)

A mental recording of his own voice, the casualest he's ever restrained it, thunders between Drakken's temples. _Of course I can do this, Shego. I_ am _a genius, after all._

And he doesn't switch it off in time to avoid Shego's immediate, snappy, _Yeah, but have you ever been_ tested?

No. He hasn't. Not since he was a senior in high school. And while Drakken is fairly certain his intellect has only increased with age, that could be his ego talking. He tries not to give the microphone to it anymore. It can be very wrong.

(For example, he thinks "casualest" may not be a word. . .)

 _That's_ why his hands are doing their best impression of baby parakeets unprepared for their first flight.

The IQ test is just, Dr. Director has told him, so they can understand exactly what they're working with and where he would serve the organization best. She _did_ also say, didn't she, that there's no way to flunk this test and be expelled from the first real job he's ever had? Drakken can't quite recall - he missed a few sentences here and there, distracted by the honor of being in her office and by her eye patch, but she must have, because he remembers leaving feeling reassured.

Drakken switches off the hovercraft, climbs out, and locks the force field into place around it. The mid-morning June sun washes down on his neck, activating sweat glands that are already loaded and ready to shoot.

Despite the serious posture he's shading onto every inch of his being, his hands flutter at his sides like nervous birds. His stomach feels like there's a colony of wasps inside, armed and ready to sting at any moment. He hasn't been this nervous in. . . well. . .

About a month.

Drakken scowls. Doesn't sound very dramatic that way.

Lackluster as it may sound, however, that is the amount of time it's been since Drakken last doubted his scientific prowess. You don't destroy the Lorwardians' extraterrestrially-advanced Spider Machines of Doom by sheer dumb luck, after all.

It's everything else that has his steps stumbling.

Drakken makes it to the plain, glass-shaded building that rests on top of Global Justice's underground headquarters. It's heavily guarded (well, only two guards, but they're very heavy), like a fort. He always feels safe here. Kind of ironic, all things considered, but it's a delicious irony.

The guards eyeball him now with a certain amount of suspicion, gripping their - _oooh_ , are those _lasers_? Delightful!

He's not afraid, though. He has an ID to get past them, and not the fake kind Eddy employed for questionable practices back in high school - what _can_ you do with a fake ID that _isn't_ questionable?

Drakken reaches into the folds of the lab coat that he ironed fresh just for today, extracts his wallet, and flips it open to flash his ID the way FBI agents show off their badges. Except their credit cards probably don't spill out of a pocket they've forgotten to zip and clatter to the ground in a disarray.

Phooey. He bends down to retrieve them and gather them into something resembling order. Most of them have been canceled, anyway, an attempt to thin down the debt thicker than anything on his body.

The first guard approves him inside, toward the entrance. The other guard nods, grumbling and towering. Drakken is suddenly acutely away of his medium-sized-ness, which is starting to feel more and more like shortness the longer he stands next to this hulking chunk of marble manhood. (Ooh, that sounds _amazing_!)

Drakken opts for the elevator. No tube rides for him today! That maze of hypersonic tunnels always nauseates him at the best of times, and he's already worked up a pretty good case of flutter-tummy.

Dr. Director is waiting in the main hall, surrounded by several of her best agents, including - _oh, no_ \- Will Du.

Drakken groans under his breath as the thrill stops halfway up his spine and loops back around, much as the test-your-strength meters at the fair do even when he hits them with a determination that should turn his muscles to steel. Will Du, the child who can speak more languages than there are letters of the alphabet, can recite the name of every current world leader, and looks down his nose at anyone else who can't. It's a rather weird nose, too, though Drakken - e-heh - _knows_ he doesn't have much room to talk.

"Ah, good morning, Dr. Drakken." Dr. Director folds her hands at her waist. "You're right on time."

Drakken grins at her. It's not his most intellectual expression - Shego's long described it as "goony" - but it matches the photo on his ID. A good picture of him, at that. Captured a good side that Drakken had just about forgotten he still had.

Will Du sniffs in his direction and gives him a look from the deep freeze. The only thing Drakken can think of to do is stick out his tongue, and that definitely won't make him seem mature or competent or any of the other things this stuck-up _kid_ thinks he isn't. (And he used to consider Kim Possible an insufferable snob.) He sticks himself as close to Dr. Director as he can without actually fastening himself to her side.

"The assessment room is all set up for you," Dr. Director says. "I'll walk you down there."

 _Assessment_. Drakken's palms immediately flood. _Assessment_ reminds him of the tests in PE every year, fighting to shimmy his way up a thick cord hung from the ceiling, receiving only derision and a horrible rope burn to show for it.

"Yes, of course, quite," Drakken replies. He's not entirely sure what that means, but it sounds very proper.

He follows Dr. Director down the hall, forcing his tiny, skittering legs into a calm pace that can still match her long strides. It is important to appear professional, today of all days.

On the way, Drakken steals glances at Dr. Director - no - poor choice of words. (He doesn't steal _anything_ anymore.) Her back is straight, her walk purposeful, her strength understated. He wants to be like her when he grows up.

And surely this place, with its narrow hallways of dark-paneled, exquisitely secretive walls, was his destiny from the very start. It's as high-ceilinged and businesslike as a cream-of-the-crop secret lair, only the shadows don't itch in Drakken's chest here.

After spending over half his life falling, he's finally hit the ground. And there was a net at the bottom.

Dr. Director leads Drakken past hulking doorways that just beg to be open. Not audibly - that would place him firmly on the wrong side of that line between genius and insanity. He's visited enough times to know it's not anywhere he would want to rent a time-share.

By the time Dr. Director halts in front of the biggest door with the fanciest lock yet, Drakken's tongue is glazed to the roof of his mouth, his throat too dry for a much-needed gulp. A woman he recognizes as - Professor Graham? Yes, that's what her nametag says. She double-checks their presence and opens the door, flanked on either side by two men in white coats who look as if they should be performing surgery rather than grading tests.

"Hello," Professor Graham says. Drakken peers over her round shoulder into the room where his brainpower will be evaluated. In the buttery-yellow light, he can make out a desk, a chair, various other furniture. A calculator and a thick sheaf of paper parked on the desk. No ceiling-ropes, no tumbling mats, no chin-up bars.

 _Phew._

"Heckle - hello," Drakken manages to sputter. He wipes at his lips to ensure no saliva has snuck out. "Sorry - I'm just a little nervous."

 _Just a little,_ as in _a lot_ , to be exact.

Professor Graham's smile is warm. "I understand, but there's no need to be. Come on inside and I'll let you know just what to expect."

With his fingers trembling as sweat oozes down them and his heart soaring so far up into the stratosphere it might bump a satellite or two, Drakken takes what he assumes is his seat. The wood is firm beneath his tingly backside. He hooks both heels on the chair legs to control the jounce of his knees, which are hopping around like two knobby, cobalt-clad kangaroos.

Professor Graham sinks into her own seat right across from him. "This is not your typical standardized test," she begins. "The questions involve math, science, English, and reading comprehension, as well as cognitive skills and problem-solving. You are graded on knowledge, retention, and application. You can also show us some of your previous work, if you like. Some questions may have more than one correct answer." She gestures to the Coats behind her. "Dr. Cone and Dr. Zane are two of our top-licensed psychologists, and they're experts at thinking outside the box and seeing all the different ways intelligence can express itself."

So far it sounds. . . nerve-wracking yet fair. He would expect nothing less from Dr. Director. Why couldn't _she_ have been his Language Arts teacher freshman year?

The Coats - Cone and Zane, though Drakken can't tell them apart - study him, their faces identical blank slots. Are they evaluating him already? Noticing how he's jittering in his seat, how his fingers twist and dance in front of him, and how only his gloves are preventing him from chewing his nails straight off?

An acute nervous pain rumbles in his stomach. Drakken crosses his arms over it to muffle the sound, smiles as big as he can, and tries to appear casual - as in _not nervous at all_ as opposed to _informally dressed_. He actually gussied himself up pretty good for this test, actually.

Uh-oh. Repeating words. Not a good sign. Not casual.

"Now, speed _will_ factor into your overall score," Professor Graham says. "However, there's no time limit." She actually winks at him. "You can't always rush genius, now, can you?"

Drakken feels a grin crack across his face, and he nods with every drop of his overflowing eagerness. She said _genius_! She believes! Or - at least - she's open to it.

All the nerves on the left side of Drakken's body contract as the corresponding hand grips a pencil. He turns it around and around, tapping the eraser end against the nice brown desktop. And, despite the fact that his heart is sending out what seem to be tiny firecrackers with every beat, he nods at Dr. Director to show this is not his first day of kindergarten and he doesn't need her here to hold his hand.

Her one good eye twinkles at him, and then she disappears in her legendary fashion.

Drakken forces his head to turn back to Professor Green, rather than cock at uncomfortable degrees to try and track Dr. Director down. The only villain who's ever come close to trailing her has been her own twin brother, Gemini. Weird guy. Too collected for his quick temper. Always holding the world's least self-assured Chihuahaua - though who wouldn't be a coward weighing in at three pounds even?

 _You're not a villain anymore, remember?_

The thought drifts over Drakken like a breeze right when the summer heat is about to boil you alive. Goose bumps - that react to any extreme change in temperature, not just sudden cold - rise on his sparsely-haired arms. It's just as it was looking into a mirror the day after he turned blue and not recognizing who he'd morphed into.

Drakken switches his attention back down to the paper awaiting him. The type is awfully small, and he gnaws the inside of his cheek -

 _Log entry, June 29th, 11:30 AM : Yowch! Never do that again._

Drakken tongues rapidly at the now-sore flesh while flashing his best nothing's-the-matter smile, closed teeth. Although typically the skin under his eyes would start to bunch along with it, that's happened less and less these past few weeks, and it doesn't happen now.

And then he glances down at the test that could very well determine his role. . . and sees nothing but a jumble of alphabet soup.

Drakken frowns, and then works on breathing hard through nostrils that have gone suddenly hot. The letters on the page are twisting in sickening similarity to every test he's ever taken since he was old enough to read.

Well, sort of read.

 _Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, please. Not here! Not NOW._

The eye-bunching program launches after all. Drakken grasps his hair-spikes. Their loose floppiness against his rigid fingers is all that keeps him from tearing at them in horror. That and the clear place, neat and blank inside his head. Drakken breathes through it until something takes shape in it.

 _Show them a sample of your own work._ Yes, he can do that. Start the assessment off with a demonstration of his brilliance. (Is it conceited to say _brilliance_? Because he's trying not to be conceited anymore. . .)

When they notice he mangles the written word, maybe then they won't be so quick to label him stupid.

Heaving his backpack to the floor, where it lands at its usual lopsided angle, Drakken yanks the slightly-rusty dual zippers apart and pulls out an inexpensive ( _no, let's face it - cheap_ ) blue folder, stuffed to the binding with notes and experiments. On top is exactly what Drakken hoped for: a calorimetry experiment, where he's taken care to label every step. Oftentimes he's too excited to write down the more humdrum bits (which perhaps explains some of his plans' failures to come to fruition), but not this time! This time, he wrote down everything, a studious scholar fully prepared to compensate for lack of a college degree.

Drakken gives the paper a push toward his three soon-to-be-colleagues and an affectionate little pat for good measure. "This is a calorimetry experiment," he says. The words come out in the same sturdy fashion in which he arranged them in his head.

Apparently that's mind-blowing, because the room goes still and everyone freezes as if someone's paused them with a remote control that's truly universal. Drakken is still trying to figure out why he, too, was not affected when Coat Two sneezes and normalcy is restored.

"You see -" Drakken taps his paper again, straightening it, fidgeting in place - "all those little _Q_ s stand for specific heat -"

Professor Graham looks at Drakken the way Shego did when he announced they should start establishing a colony on the moon and charge any future spacecrafts billions of dollars to land. (Another bid for global domination that went belly-up fast.) "Dr. Drakken. . . there are no _Q_ s."

"Wha - I mean, beg pardon?" For an instant, Drakken fears they're drifting in the vacuum of space, something out of a sci-fi horror film (not his favorite genre), where basic things such as letters blink right out of existence.

"In your notes," Professor Graham says. "They're all _P_ s."

Drakken falls across the desktop, contacts nearly popping out to view his own work. He sees _Q_ s - no, wait, he sees _P_ s. He sees _P_ s and _Q_ s. _P_ faces the right and _Q_ faces the left. . . right?

Shame burns a course across his face.

A vision of canceled credit cards spilling pell-mell to the floor flashes before Drakken. What he garbles - something along the lines of "mgg nih qag" - makes about as much sense as his flipped-backward notes.

Coat One turns to Coat Two. All four eyebrows shoot up in a _well-this-is-telling_ expression. Drakken feels uneasy. What has he just revealed about himself?

That he has a disease? That he's pure evil after all? That he's really part Lorwardian on his father's side? The last one would explain so much, actually. . .

 _I'm sorry! I can fix it!_ he wants to cry, except the second part's not quite true, and his lips are stuck shut with what amounts to industrial-strength wax.

Professor Graham whisks the sheets of the test, his test, off the desk and taps them to line the edges up. "Change of plans," she tells Drakken. His knees vibrate as if they've been whacked with a doctor's reflex-hammer as he waits to be dismissed. "We're going to be administering this test orally."

 _Orally_. Through the _spoken_ word. A metric ton of worry, denser than lead, lifts from Drakken's shoulders. A reprieve!

He doesn't always speak that good. . . goodly. . . well (case in point, here). But when it comes to science - a topic he actually knows about - he can wax eloquent for greater lengths than a politician intent on delaying a bill. (Shego came up with that analogy, because she's also very smart in her own way.)

Drakken helpfully tosses his pencil in Coat One's direction, bite marks and all. There's no discreet place to spit the wood shavings, so he swallows them, like the noble spy who must protect the confidential papers, even at risk of acid indigestion!

"Question 1," Professor Graham reads. " _i_ is. . ."

 _That's some pretty poor grammar right there,_ Drakken thinks, before she continues with, ". . .an unreal number. What would you do if you encountered _i_ in an equation?"

Oh, heavens above. An unreal number. That's just peachy!

Drakken restrains his first impulse, which is more answer than question: _It's not real! Shouldn't I just ignore it?_ He tips - not too far back - in his chair and slams his eyelids together so nothing can distract him. There's a loophole here, somewhere, and he knows it, in some obscure little corner of himself.

 _Think, Drakken! Think!_

An unreal number. Who invented that concept, and why did the mathematical world let him get away with creating his own numbers that don't exist in nature? In chemistry, you have to work with so many different decimals, nonequivalent fractions, ratios that need to be converted - metric to standard, Celsius to Kelvin. And in geometry, you work with irrationals like pi, which can admittedly be a little nerve-wracking. With unreals, though, you get the difficulty amped up to the hundredth power -

 _That's it!_

" _i_ is the square root of negative one," Drakken says, eyes still shut. "If I saw _i_ squared, I would know the resulting number is negative one. Which _can_ be worked with."

He squints his eyes back open in time to see Coat Two nod to Coat One and both of them scribble on their clipboards. Their faces are still stern, still serious. Nothing he's said has been laughably wrong, then.

The clear space floods with hope.

* * *

That's how math continues to progress. It helps that they let him use a calculator, just to prevent the awfulness of performing an entire trigonometry problem flawlessly and then multiplying seven by five and getting twelve. That's a huge grunt-inducer, right up there with hanging-on-by-a-thread hangnails and slush inside your boots.

Drakken grins his way all through science. His armpits stay blessedly dry as he names elements by classification and orders the journey from theory to scientific law. When asked who invented the first working microscope, he blurts, "Leeuwenhoek!" before his multiple-choices are even read off to him.

Life would be so much easier if it were all pure science.

English, now that's tricky. Professor Graham is nice enough to note where the periods and commas are so he can decide if a sentence is properly punctuated, but Drakken still feels like he's been thrown into a gladiator pit with nary a Doomsday device in sight, unless you count the Silly Hat he must be wearing. It's mostly guesswork, and his ponytail is wilting at his collar by the time he's done.

Reading comprehension is easier than Drakken had expected. No confusing grammar rules required; you just need to listen to a passage and show you understand it.

Problem-solving involves a lot of little puzzles. Some of them test logic as it applies to math and science, _Highlights_ brain-teasers for grown-ups. (Man, how he adored those things as a kid!) What Drakken's really surprised by is the ease with which he takes to business application.

Hey, he didn't once run all those cupcake stores for nothing!

An encouraging thought at the time. Yet now, as Drakken stands here, sequestered away from the discussion and the calculation of his results, he's tormenting himself with the reminder of going out of business. Making dumb mistakes. Failing.

Every bit of his anxiety software is being downloaded, and it's downright impossible to sit quietly in a chair and be patient when that occurs. Drakken paces, focuses on kinetic energy. Grows and retracts vines. Ponders what to have for supper tonight.

 _This is only my entire destiny being sorted out in there!_ His sarcasm is a pale imitation of Shego's, and Drakken chucks it aside. All right, he needs to keep his cool.

He decides to let his arms rest at his sides sedately. Inside, however, he's anything but sedate. It's taking all his visceral self-control not to rupture something and have to go to the hospital.

By the time the door opens, at _last_ , after what must be four or six hours, he does have a pretty good case of the hiccups. They vanish - a-ha, so you _can_ startle them away! - when Drakken recognizes a practical-short haircut and a spine that has never known a self-conscious hunch.

Dr. Director.

Almost on autopilot, Drakken's own spine stiffens into a pole, and he salutes her with a smart little snap. He can only pray that the rest of him is equally smart.

Dr. Director's face is pressed into her smile, made all the more pleasant by its rarity. Between that and her one-eyed sparkle, she doesn't _appear_ to be about to "slam" him, as the teens today say. Drakken's insides quiet just a smidgen.

"Results are just about ready, Dr. Drakken," Dr. Director says. She sinks down into one chair, and in a valiant effort not to be rude, Drakken squats into a pseudo-sit, buns a full two inches off the seat.

"Then - then why are you out early?" Drakken asks. A best-case scenario has him by one earlobe and a worst-case scenario by the other. Each is screaming so loudly he can't hear the other.

"I thought you would be interested to know why we had you take the test orally rather than on paper," Dr. Director says.

Drakken feels as if he's stepped onto a downstairs escalator when he was expecting an upstairs one. Not thrown to the ground, but sinking, slowly, slowly. "Why _did_ you give me an oral test?" It's almost a whistle, drifting high and pulled tight.

Dr. Director folds her hands briskly in her lap. "Because we are fairly certain you have what's known as dyslexia."

She doesn't say it as though it drops the curtains on his career at Global Justice, and that's the only thing that prevents Drakken from tumbling his chair over completely backward. Still, he knows his eyes are batting speeding-ticket-fast as he stares at her. "That's - that's not a disease, right?" he asks.

"Goodness, no." Dr. Director's voice is as unruffled as ever, in every sense of the word. No snags of emotion, no fancy frills. "It's a learning. . . well, I hesitate to even call it a disability. It's a learning _difficulty_."

 _Learning difficulty. Learning difficulty._

The words tumble around Drakken's head like mismatched socks in the dryer. He adjusts the cuffs of his sleeves - still so baggy ever since his lengthy stay in Cell Block D. His fingers need to be occupied, and surely tapping their tips together isn't all that professional.

"It's a bit of a hiccup in your brain's mechanics - _not_ your intelligence." Dr. Director lifts an emphatic finger. "When you read, your brain will reverse letters and sometimes even see whole words backward. Some people have the same problem with numbers, and in most every case it's worsened by stress."

If there's more to what she's saying, Drakken doesn't hear it over the cymbals clanging in his skull. The clanging and the text-free images of himself, his entire life. Struggling to catch up in the second-grade reader. Hunched over yet _another_ rejection letter from a genius meeting, reading it for the twenty-fifth time at least because all the words crashed into each other like poorly-driven cars.

Florida. His signal tapping into hearing aids and not MP3 players. His calculations were correct - Drakken had checked them on multiple occasions after the fact - he just wrote them down wrong. A frequency of 186.4 at 220 megahertz became 614.8 at 202 megahertz. He switched the digits.

Now he knows why.

There's a steady, let-you-breathe throb that Drakken takes full advantage of, gobbling air like it's as tasty as peanut butter.

 _This is me. This is me!_

Something washes over Drakken - something like tears, only softer and thicker and not as draining. His lips flap wordlessly, though not soundlessly, for several minutes before he regains the power of speech. Which he's so busy doing, he forgets to check his volume, so it bounces off the ceiling, the floor, and all four walls when he blurts, "You mean it's a _thing_?"

"Yes, it is." If Dr. Director is amused, she's keeping her mouth-twitches to herself. "A very well-documented thing, at that."

"So - other people have it besides me?"

"Many other people, yes."

Drakken plasters both hands over his face. "I always thought I was just a stupid reader!" he kind-of-wails into them.

"Definitely not," Dr. Director says, dropping to a soft murmur. "As a matter of fact, most people with dyslexia are of above-average intelligence and many come up with brilliant ways to compensate for their difficulties."

Drakken can only gape at her. Did she - did she just say. . .

"Nevertheless, a written test would not have been the best format for us to judge your IQ," Dr. Director continues. "And if we don't give all of our employees their best formats, it would be ridiculously unfair."

"Ridiculously," Drakken repeats faintly.

The door creaks again, and Drakken jumps a quarter-mile - _seriously_ , that noise gets louder every time it opens! Professor Graham pokes her head out and beckons them in with a finger-wave.

Dr. Director rises and strides into the calculation room, the Room of Fate. Drakken follows her on nervous-numb feet. The cymbals are incessant now, like they're being banged around by one of those little monkey toys. He has to agree with the formerly-a-buffoon here - those things are _creepy_.

Professor Graham ushers them in and motions for them to take their seats. Drakken lowers his shaking body and is sideways on the floor before he realizes the chair is an obnoxious seventy-five degrees to the right. Professor Graham might be hiding a grin, but she doesn't have the Coats revise his score.

He opts to remain standing anyway.

Dr. Director, wonderful, wonderful Dr. Director, also stands, as if it is her duty to counterbalance his awkwardness. She's still standing when a slender piece of paper is pressed into her palm, and then she nudges his meager biceps with her shoulder and leads the way back to the waiting room. Normally, Drakken hates being led around the way he leads Commodore Puddles on a leash, but he no longer trusts his dizzied walk.

The door shuts behind them, sealing them in privacy. A good thing, Drakken decides, for nothing in the world could keep him from bouncing on his toes now and crying, "Well? Well? Well?"

He has no idea how long he'd go on saying, "Well?" Before he can find out, Dr. Director gives the paper a tap and it methodically unfolds in her hand, like it _knows_ she's Boss Lady. The smushed-together scribble, the kind you usually get on medical prescriptions, would pose a challenge even for someone _without_ \- what was that thing called again? Dyslexia?

Only the number at the bottom, written in bold, snags onto Drakken and stays with him.

149.

The genius cut-off is 150.

Drakken takes one wobbly step backward. Well - well - it's much better than the results of his nightmare scenario. 149 is well above average, nothing to sneeze at. (Another expression Drakken's never understood. Your elbow is the best thing to sneeze at to prevent the spread of germs, but what does that have to do with importance?)

And yet - it cuts him a little. Right in that spot between your thumb and forefinger that stings like the dickens.

"149," Drakken whispers. All traces of his vocal thunder are gone.

Dr. Director's gaze sympathetically holds his. If there were even a hint of pity in her eye, Drakken would've fallen to the ground and perhaps begun crying.

Instead, he's able to straighten and gasp, "Please - please don't tell anyone. I'll never hear the end of it." Professor Dementor, James Possible, even his beloved Shego - they'd have a heyday with this.

"Granted." Dr. Director refolds the paper and rests it in her pocket. "As far as I'm concerned, Dr. Drakken, you _are_ a genius."

Tingles of light explode up Drakken's arms. "You mean it?"

The eye patch makes it look as though Dr. Director's winking at him. "What's one IQ point between friends?" she says.

 _I want to hug her!_ ricochets through Drakken's brain.

 _I probably shouldn't hug her._

Rather than put all 149-IQ-points worth of his sense to the test, Drakken settles for a high-five. Happiness in manual form. Dr. Director seems startled, but she doesn't leave him hangin'.

Yo.

* * *

Professor Graham also reports to Dr. Director that Drakken has "an aptitude for math and science" and "demonstrates creativity in problem-solving." She doesn't even say _creativity_ with that kind of pruned-up disapproval his Language Arts teachers always used to describe his spelling.

And the rest of the day is right up there with malted milk balls, as far as Drakken is concerned.

Dr. Director shows him to the lab where he'll be working - 591. The door swings inward, a fact Drakken resolves to remember. Even before his eyes adjust to the relative dimness, he's met by a wave of that wonderful chemical scent and the bubbling of some concoction, and it's all he needs. He's in paradise.

The lab isn't _quite_ as big as the wonderful one in DNAmy's basement, but it's just as busy. Gadgets and Bunsen burners and instruments of measure scattered everywhere.

Drakken introduces himself to his new lab partners. Shakes their hands, which turns out better than anticipated considering he worried the excitement might shock them right through his palms like a joy buzzer. When they look back at him, it's not from Will-Du-slits. Nothing worse than wariness passes through their eyes.

It brings Drakken out of the crouch he's held himself in for so long. The room glows just that little bit brighter, maybe because the overhead lights are just that little bit closer, and his chest expands until the padding over it seems superfluous (a fancy way of saying he doesn't need it anymore). The vast sweep of the lab should cast him as punier than ever, but it has the exact opposite effect.

He's always liked his causes to be bigger than himself.

Drakken makes the acquaintance of the lab rats, who he discovers are much friendlier than their cold little claws and hairless, snake-shaped tails would suggest. He is led to the cafeteria - fresh and bright, without the mystery-meat stench that characterized the ones in school. (Or in prison.) He's shown all the emergency exits, information he will probably retain right up until the very moment when he actually _needs_ it.

Times of crises basically wash all that right out of his brain. He could get lost in his own house during an emergency - well, granted, he's only lived there for a few weeks. Okay, he could get lost in his own house _with a map and a GPS_ during an emergency. That fixes the metaphor, right?

Ah, well. If nothing else, his flowers have shown to be strong enough to break through walls. Drakken immediately labels that a Very Last Resort, though. He certainly doesn't want to do damage to this building where he feels so welcome.

All the while, the official report keeps running in currents through his mind-stream. _Aptitude for math and science. Creativity in problem-solving._ Even _dyslexia_.

It's a strange-sounding word, almost coming out in a hiss (and would probably, ironically, be pretty hard to spell). And yet there's some beauty in its pinpoint finality.

When Drakken asks Dr. Director if he'll need to wear a suit and tie to work, she gives him the "no" he was hoping for. Drakken swallows a rising cheer. He's never been able to tie a Half Windsor or a Half Nelson or whatever you call that tie-tying tie. The last time he wore one was probably that disastrous night when he created the first Bebes.

Unless you count bow-ties, in which case it would be that _other_ night, maybe worse, when he visited The Bermuda Triangle. . .

Drakken wags his head, denying the memories access.

At the end of the day, he hurries down the hall, hailing Dr. Director on the way with a big arm-wave and an even bigger smile. She's not the grinning type, but something slips around the corners of her mouth. Does that a lot when she's around him.

And it doesn't even make him feel like a failure.

Drakken flashes his ID for the two big guards as he's leaving. The urge to hug someone is overpowering, and he'd probably be Tasered for embracing one of them. He's got to get home to Commodore Puddles.

Part of him hates to leave, though. He steps out into the evening air and turns to give the plainclothes building one last longing look, the way couples do in movies when one of them has to fly off to Abu Dhabi or someplace.

That changes the instant Drakken registers the atmosphere. That the sun hasn't yet dipped behind the row of businesses across the street, even though it must be five-thirty pm. Well, of course it hasn't - the summer solstice has arrived while Drakken wasn't looking. One can hardly keep track of the seasons in between Doomsday schemes and his own nightmares.

It's _gorgeous_ now.

He swings his arms around and laughs into the crisp early summer air. The world is new and green - has been since April, actually, but only now is he truly able to appreciate it. The honeysuckle on the breeze, the sunshine not dialed up to oppressive levels yet, the sound of birds chirping.

Of course, there are also flies. Drakken swats at one now, dive-bombing around his face. Bothersome little bugs. How many of his evil plans went wrong back in the day just because he was going after a fly that landed on the self-destruct button?

(Nowadays, he's grateful that he never managed to melt the polar ice caps or flood Wisconsin in magma, but - _oooohh_ , the frustration of it can still steep his taffy! Or whatever the saying is.)

The fly is momentarily stunned, and Drakken darts ahead of it, swinging his arms wide while twirling toward the parking lot. Shego would say he looks like someone from _The Sound of Music_ , and Drakken just doesn't see how that can even be an insult. For now, he doesn't care who sees as he hops from sidewalk square to sidewalk square, as if they're clouds you can bounce on in a video game, where the law of gravity doesn't apply and vaporous objects such as clouds can bear weight.

That's when his phone tweets from his pocket.

 _Hmmm,_ Drakken thinks as he unlocks the hovercraft's force field and swings himself into the driver's seat. _That sound doesn't ring any bells._

 _Literally_ doesn't ring them. If it did, that would mean he was getting a call. A bear-growl would be the alarm going off, and a sharp squawk is his phone's way of saying, _Low battery - plug me in now before I get REALLY angry!_

The tweet, though? That's new.

Drakken extracts, flips up, and examines the phone that he just got Internet on last month. A large red exclamation point bobs up and down beside the news that _someone has commented on your page on Villainster_.

Drakken's stomach knots into a Half Windsor. He flashes back to the old Drakken, the crouched, blotchy, self-conscious mad scientist who no one would peg as a supervillain but who was his own personal evil's best catalyst.

Villainster. He's forgotten he even _had_ a Villainster account. His life was overturned so quickly the night (and super-early morning) of the alien invasion. He didn't get a chance to burn all the bridges behind him that required burning, although anyone with half a brain could see that they were condemned property.

 _Oh. It's Professor Dementor. Well, that it explains it._

Drakken scolds himself for the thought, albeit not very harshly.

He closes his eyes for a second, just in case his will wobbles. Just to fill it with things stronger than the both of them. Hydro-Pollinator goo roaring through him as he lifted the nozzle to bring about justice. Shego smiling her first drop of pride at him during his ceremony. The entirety of Global Justice. The epic proportions of this cause were sketched when the clear place offered Drakken his first truly foolproof plan, revealed themselves when he realized he'd relinquished control of the world, and cinched at the same moment the cords of his medal did.

Maybe it was even a Half Windsor.

It is there, inside him, a picture, a knowledge, something that cannot be rolled over and contorted as letters and numbers can. If only - if only he could put it into words, his argument would blow his naysayers away.

Dementor's text is as blocky and loudmouthed and oddly graceful as Drakken remembers it. _Ha!_ it reads. _Now that Dr. Drakken has defected to the good side, I believe it is safe to say I win our little contest of who can take over the world first!_

Drakken stares at the phone screen, puzzled by the lack of thrashing inside. Ordinarily, he'd be feeling like he's been run down by a plow. Instead, while his cheeks sizzle the way they always do at the faintest suggestion of Dementor's presence, he's not crumbling up, scrunching, and wanting to hide.

He's proven himself now.

And all that gloating? Just a fat juicy lie. Evildoers' gloating always was.

The only true statement to ever leave Dementor's mouth - or keyboard - as far as Drakken could recall, was that Drakken would make a better good guy than a villain.

Drakken won't deny his fingers are still shaking when he clicks the _Reply_ icon and types out his message. Everything is nervously clacking from side to side. Everything, that is, except the clear place, which is feeding him what to say:

 _Actually, Dementor_ \- his Spellchecker annoyingly doesn't count that as a word, but Drakken quickly forgives it when it rearranges his dyslexia-induced misspellings of the multi-syllable ones - _you win nothing! When I defeated the aliens, I had wrested control from the ones who had conquered Planet Earth. I had control of the world._

 _I won the contest! And then I forfeited!_

 _Now, doesn't that just make you_ mad _?_

Then Drakken snaps the phone shut. And he smiles.

 **~I based Dementor's comment after a real message left on his Villainster blog (which was an actual feature on the old KP website) that read, "Ha! Now that Dr. Drakken is in prison, I think it is safe to say that I win our little contest as to who can take over the world first!" Needless to say, that was set at the beginning of S4.**

 ***hugs to readers and reviewers* See you in 2016!~**


	14. Take Me Back To Prison

**~Okay, so this one got away from me. :P It's also my first narrative by an OC (that I've dared to post, that is). So I'm keeping my fingers crossed.**

 **NOTE: A little blood, a lot of jerkishness, a few neo-Nazis, and Suicide Watch.~**

Marcus Mason was no softie. In this business, softness basically invited a knife in the back - sometimes literally.

That didn't mean he couldn't _pity_ the inmates some.

From the outside, from a distance, they all looked like monsters - murderers, embezzlers, drug lords. Only if you watched them with a hawk-eye and never let up, every minute of every shift, could you ever pick out a flickering glimpse at who they once were:

Men driven insane by the need for revenge. Men terrified of the thought of poverty and powerlessness. Men who were neck-deep in their own crap because they'd taken their first hit when they were twelve.

It didn't crack Mason's heart in two or drive him to weep, the way it had when he was a kid. It was only the slimmest of knots in his gut, strung tight as a bowstring, that clued him in.

Some of the guys would be released someday. Most would have to wait decades before they even went up for parole. A few would never leave at all.

And even when and if they did - _let's be real_ \- what future did they have? Who would hire or marry or rent to an ex-felon?

Who'd keep them from ending up like Mason's own screwed-up great-uncle, so hated and feared that it'd been no surprise when he'd been found dead? And he was only a caught-on-possession, state-pen-level convict.

If the justice system was the well-oiled machine Mason tried to believe it was, then he was a grim, solitary gear. Whenever he got an opportunity to request a move for some con whose cellmate was using his head for a soccer ball, he just hoped that gear was making any difference at all.

He was working the night shift when the demon toys invaded and Mason saw the eyes of even the most hardened criminals flash terror. The darkness was torn up with laser blasters, and suddenly all that stood between any of them and death were sheer luck, speed, and a hastily-constructed barricade of tables and cots.

The one good thing about what was later dubbed "the Diablo attack" was that a guy didn't have time to worry about himself or his family. He was way too busy steering everyone into storm-safe locations. Calling Global Justice's hotline. Checking and re-bolting locks, as if that would've made a whole lot of difference once one of the walls was blasted into rubble. Running after the escapees, most of whom had taken one look at the deadly scene outside and run back to the relative safety of the pen. A few who didn't had to be Tasered and dragged back unconscious.

Hours later - after the morbid machine had shrunk back into a toy, which Mason promptly stomped on and destroyed - the news reported that a supervillain named Dr. Drakken was taking credit for the attack. Mason had never heard of him, but he figured they'd be getting acquainted real soon. Unless the judge gave him the chair, that was.

There were too many arrows strung in Mason's stomach for that thought to even register.

Not a single, jagged piece of this felt real. Least of all them being saved by a teenage girl. Kim Possible he _had_ heard of - admired her spark, her spunk, her streak of compassion. By the granite set of her jaw, those had all been pushed to the brink this time. It was hard to remember she was only sixteen, until she'd cut her interview short so she could return to _prom_. Heck if Mason knew why it'd still be running, but the kid had definitely earned herself a dance or two.

The instant the sirens died down, the phone started ringing off the hook. The insurance company, salivating for an assessment of the damage. Locals, demanding to know if security had been breached, or if they could pack their panic away. The occasional mother still concerned for her incarcerated son.

Mason gave mechanical answers to all of them, not even feeling the coffee scorch his tongue as he sipped it straight from the pot.

Only when a deliberately emotionless female voice asked to speak to Sykes did the pieces click together and come into focus like a pair of prescription lenses. Sykes was the roughest of the guards, a bit too rough for Mason's taste, but - hey, it got the job done. He couldn't complain.

Sykes snatched the phone from Mason's hand and barked out a "What?"

And then his face drained of all color, throwing its coating of stubble into a relief so stark it seemed to be jumping right off. "What. . . where? No, no - no! That can't be true!"

The room went as silent as it had ever gone.

"You mean - forever?" Sykes said. "Yeah, I _know_ forever is a long time, smartbutt. . . that's why I asked. Oh, come on. Get real! Can't I _talk_ to him? Sleeping? He's sleeping right now? Well, when is he gonna wake up? Yeah, thanks. That's a _reeeeealllll_ help. Call me the _second_ something changes, you hear me? The. Very. Second!"

Sykes hung up and smashed a burly fist into the wall. Mason watched him replace the receiver, noting the sweat outlining his palms. "Sykes?" he asked.

"Frank," Sykes said. "My _cousin_ Frank?"

It was another arrow in the quiver. Frank had come with them to the bar a few times. Nice guy. Wouldn't touch anything stronger than Bud Light. Smile that went all the way until you couldn't believe he was related to Sykes at all.

"Is he. . .?" It was the first time in years Mason hadn't been able to finish a sentence.

"Alive. And freakin' paralyzed. Maybe forever. His whole life's been shot up by some stupid, psycho. . ." Sykes's words died in an explosion of profanity and pain.

There was no point in a hand on the shoulder, an "I'm sorry, man." There was no comforting something like this.

And Sykes would've despised him for the effort.

Marcus shifted his attention back to the exhausted reporter onscreen, surrounded by a ring of Diablos like she was performing some kinda Satanic ritual. It was hard not to imagine the ground opening up and dragging them back down to where they belonged.

And their split-lipped, sky-colored commander with them.

* * *

Dr. Drakken wasn't what Mason had been expecting.

The orange jumpsuit had a way of humbling and shrinking a man. So did the enclosed walls of solitary confinement.

Lanky and powder-blue, Drakken looked freakish but harmless. Definitely not the sort you'd peg for a killer. But then, killers rarely were.

If Drakken hadn't been listed as forty-one in the file Mason had read, he would've staked his life on the guy not being a day over thirty - at most. The strained, baggy eyelids, pitch-black against his pallor, testified to weariness, not age. His jawline was smooth and rounded, his arms never grown out of adolescent awkwardness. At a glance, he could've been bound for juvenile detention instead.

According to that same file, Drakken was coming down from a higher-than-prescribed dose of ADHD meds. _No kidding?_ Mason knew withdrawal when he saw it - the constantly twitchy hands, the sunken dryness around his lips, the miserable slump in his back.

Those weren't a druggie's eyes he'd seen on the news footage, though. They were clear and bright with anger, full of intelligence, peeking out from a place nobody in their right mind could follow.

It'd been a good long time since Mason had clapped eyes with a bona fide madman. And the only explanation he'd been coherent enough to give them?

Bullied when he was a kid.

Mason grunted to himself. Bullying, huh? The guys in here made any bullies on the outside look like catty middle-school girls teaming up to exclude the chubby girls with braces.

Drakken had also been in and out of jail for the last twenty-or-so years, for schemes that would've surely been devastating if put into action. They'd just never gotten far enough, thanks to Kim Possible or Global Justice or his own shoddy planning, for anyone to take the guy seriously.

He was no stranger to prison, Mason was sure. But he had the face of a fish - a first-timer. All the sunken places were trembling like he was on the receiving end of one of his own deadly toys.

A gentle shove on the back was all it took to send Drakken pitching into the six-by-eight cell and straight onto the cot. He grabbed the tissue-thin sheets between his fingers and twisted the strands until his knobby knuckles turned white.

"All right, pal," Mason said. "This is gonna be your home for awhile, until we make sure you aren't a danger to yourself or others. So you might as well get comfortable."

Holding his spine with the same inflexible authority he'd use to handle a gun, Mason steeled himself for the inevitable shaky, defiant middle finger.

Instead, he got a shaky, defiant, "I hate you!"

Mason almost spit out a laugh. _I hate you?_ Was the dude serious? He sounded like he'd been plucked straight from kindergarten. "Don't think I heard you right, pal."

"No, you heard me quite well!" Dr. Drakken twisted his neck to glare back at Mason, and the effort seemed to be too much. His cheeks bathed with the same white as his hands, the raggedy scar on his left cheekbone as near-3-D as Sykes's whiskers had been. "I hate you! I hate all of you. You're keeping me in this place as if I'm some sort of common criminal, when where I belong is on a throne ruling over you all!"

 _Holy crow. Delusional, much?_

"Not the way it works around here, buddy," Mason said. He injected every ounce of kindness he had left into his voice, dropped it to a kid-coaxing whisper. "The planet isn't just up for grabs to whoever's got the sickest firepower. There've been so many wars fought over that. . ."

"I'd stop them," Drakken blurted. His whiteness had flushed pink. "If I were in charge of the world, there'd be no more wars. I'd fix up this place. . . if you'd just give me a chance. . ." He rose from the cot at an unstable lurch. "But you won't! No one will!"

Mason's fist went automatically to his belt. "That's because it's a little hard to buy that 'peace and prosperity' stuff when you come in with guns blazing."

"How else am I supposed to do it when no one will give me a fair shot?"

So far this was like trying to talk to the creature Gollum.

Mason straightened to his own full height, a head taller than Dr. Drakken. "Look, pal, I'm not trying to make you miserable. Heaven knows you've taken care of that pretty well by yourself. But the sooner you 'fess up to all the junk you've pulled, the smoother this will go for all of us."

For half a moment, Drakken's eyes seemed to be weighing that. Then a set of Venetian blinds dropped over them, reducing any vulnerability to peeks between the slats. "This will never go smoothly! I will fight until - the b-bitter end," he snapped.

Mason wondered if he could hear the tears cracking through.

Drakken planted his back to Mason, hunching himself over against the wall. "Over and over and over again, I've had to watch my plans be foiled by my intellectual inferiors! Why should I try to cooperate with such an unfairly stacked world?"

If that were meant as threatening, it flopped. It was pathetic. Just this side of a whine.

"Make no mistake," Drakken continued. "These four walls cannot hold Dr. Drakken - and neither can the seventeen other walls I counted on my way in! I have underworld connections, yo! Someone will come and break me out. . . and in the meantime" - Drakken's neck visibly straightened like he was ironing the slump out - "I shall rule this prison! Just you wait and see!"

Mason winced. The guy was five-foot-ten on his tiptoes, and seated he was a pathetic, scrawny little mess. Marcus had seen smaller guys - but few of them had screamed "PERFECT DUMP TARGET" the way this dude's shriveled body language and phony upper-crust accent did.

 _Um. Yeah. In your dreams, squirt._

"Well, we'll see what happens," Mason said. He propped a foot on Drakken's cot to test if the cockiness was real. The man backpedaled, but the arrogance stayed on his face like a plaster mask.

Rubbing at his throbbing temples, Mason swept out of the confined cell and locked the door behind him. The knot in his gut dragged his eyes back to the only window, about the size and shape of an envelope.

Dr. Drakken had grabbed his deflated-looking pillow and hugged it against his torso, the sneer still fixed even while he bent double and heaved his whole body back and forth. Rumbles issued from his gravelly throat.

Yup, full-fledged bonkers. How could you _not_ pity that?

Especially since the guys in here would scarf him down for a snack.

* * *

As it turned out, Mason was right. Most of the guys with no moves or street cred still knew to keep their heads down, their mouths shut, in order to get through their sentence with the fewest number of bruises possible. Not this Dr. Drakken. It was impossible to forget the dude was there - the blue skin and auditioning-for-Broadway voice basically labeled him a T-bone steak at an all-you-can-eat buffet.

When Drakken was finally released from solitary confinement, his eventual cellmate was the only inmate less tough than he was - Frugal Lucre, some washed-up computer geek who probably wouldn't even be here in the first place if the bureaucracy hadn't cracked down on cyber-crimes so much lately. Lucre was _also_ the only guy around who could out-talk Drakken, both in length and absurdity. Mason suspected that that was the only thing that saved him from being shark bait. None of the other men could stand to be near him long enough to beat him up.

Did Drakken appreciate it? Hardly. Every yammered-out sentence from Lucre seemed to plunge him deeper and deeper into insanity. Mason witnessed several occasions when Drakken would slam his hands over his ears and rock, radiating tension that screamed, _Make-it-stop-make-it-stop!_

Which was how Mason found him that morning when he arrived to work the day shift. He flicked on the lights, jangled his keys, and called the prisoners to breakfast.

Lucre was the first one at the barred door, practically panting like a dog eager to be released from his kennel. Usually, Drakken was right behind him. Dude had a pretty bad case of claustrophobia on top of everything else.

This time, though, he was planted firmly on his bunk, ears covered, gaze intent on the wall. "I'm not going," he snarled.

For real?

While Sykes escorted the rest of the prisoners off to the cafeteria, Mason slipped into Drakken's cell, grinding his teeth, one hand on his holster. How the heck was he supposed to do this? He'd never trained to teach first grade.

"What's the deal, pal?" Mason said.

The ridge of Drakken's shoulders collapsed, swimming in the orange fabric that had clung to him like a strip of Velcro when he first arrived. "Just what I said. I'm not going."

Mason would've laughed out loud if it wouldn't have also been an equal-parts scream. "Uh-huh. And why not?"

"I'm not hungry." Drakken had yet to look Mason full in the face. A vividly indigo bruise in an unmistakable fist shape marked his wrist - the wrist that poked out like on some twiggy fashion model.

Normally it took more than a bruise to knot one of Mason's arrows.

"Are you afraid you'll throw up again?"

"Dr. Drakken fears nothing!" Drakken's voice broke off into sheets of ice. "Besides, it scarcely matters. I won't be living here much longer. Shego's going to bust herself out of prison, and then she'll come for me, too!"

Mason's throat momentarily shuddered. He'd never had to deal with Shego herself, but he hoped there was a whole platoon guarding her over on the women's side. That was one scary chick.

And Drakken's chin was hiked up so insistently, so remorselessly, Mason had to ask, "But what if she doesn't come?"

Drakken visibly flinched. When he spoke again, it was a brittle, "I hate you."

Mason wiped a sliver of a grin away with the back of his hand. "Well. Sorry you feel that way. Are the other guys bugging you too badly?" He was careful not to so much as glance at the bruise.

The ponytail stiffened. "I hate them, too!"

Was there anybody he _didn't_ hate right now?

Mason forced himself between Drakken and the wall, squatting down to rest his elbow on the chunky cot. "You don't call the shots anymore, pal. Not in here."

If there was one thing Dr. Drakken was accustomed to on the outside, Mason had figured out pretty quickly, it was barking out orders. He'd charge up and start giving them to some brute twice his size and ten times his meanness. Nobody fought that hard for their ego unless it was an endangered species.

"And you better learn that soon, or you're seriously gonna wind up in trouble," Mason continued.

Drakken coughed up a bitter noise. "Ohhhh, I'll be in trouble? Guess what - I'm already _in_ trouble! If I weren't in trouble, I wouldn't even be _speaking_ to you! I wouldn't have ever _met_ you!"

It was meant to be sassy. It was closer to the cry of a sick bull moose.

Mason felt himself reaching for the whisper again. "Look, I'm sorry you're having such a crummy stay." The skin around Drakken's glazed eyes tweaked, trying to prevent their widening. "But I'm not in a position to fix that right now. Best you can do now is come with me."

Drakken's response was predictable - a proclamation of hatred for everyone and everything within a fifty-mile radius. But he pushed himself into an unsteady stand and made a wobbly trek toward the bars. In the doorway, he turned and shot Mason a single, grateful look that lingered in his stomach all the way down to the cafeteria.

Where Drakken plopped himself down on a plastic bench and resumed staring at nothing.

Even though they were a week into summer, goose bumps dotted his forearms. While the other guys were complaining about the heat and rolling up their shirtsleeves, Drakken would claim to be freezing and hide beneath his blanket. The guy had lost so much weight, he couldn't keep his own body warm anymore.

No wonder. Drakken spent basically the entire allotted hour listlessly stirring the cold oatmeal that, admittedly, wasn't the most appetizing dish in the world. Every now and then Mason would see him raise a spoonful to his mouth - but most of the time that ended with Drakken snapping his head away and swallowing a lot as if staving off his gag reflex. At one point, his lips had started to crumple, although the instant Mason started toward him, they recoiled back into a sneer. The dude's wall was transparent, but impenetrable.

The father in Mason saw a stubborn toddler refusing strained peas.

Drakken had probably consumed a whopping five calories before the prisoners were marched down to the multi-purpose room. Even though it boasted a cable TV and Internet access, along with a few paperback books and several board games, most of the men were exclusively interested in the exercise equipment that ran along one whole wall. The three-hundred-pound steroid-pumpers got first dibs on all their favorites, leaving the smaller ninety percent to fight it out over the rest of it.

The inmates that spent their lives working to be invisible grabbed books and slunk out of the way. Drakken flopped like a wet pancake onto the sofa and flipped the television to some drippy soap opera Mason knew Drakken couldn't have given a hang about. The thick glaze still hanging over his eyes showed it could have been _Teletubbies_ for all Drakken could tell. Frugal Lucre sat down in the first quiet corner he could find and proceeded to fill it with blabber.

Mason performed his usual rounds:

Confiscating a lighter from Pyro Pete, ignoring his whining claim that he just wanted a cigarette.

Breaking up the daily skirmish for the StairMaster.

Monitoring the guys online to make sure they hadn't hacked past the filter straight onto some YouTube video on homemade bombs.

There _was_ some dweeb in the process of ordering sixty cases of fancy liquor and attempting to charge the prison for it. Mason yanked out the entire router, said a single word - "Really?" - and then walked backward across the room. Turning away wasn't an option in one of those situations, even with the least violent inmates.

The scuffling sounds were just loud enough to divert Mason's attention once Crawley had stepped in to reroute the computers. Dr. Drakken was no longer on the couch.

Mason knew before he even started looking that the blue guy would be backed into a corner, pinned to the wall by five different fists so that his prison sneaks didn't even touch the floor tiles.

"Yeah, you think you're better than us, don'tcha?" came a surly growl. "Well, guess what, bluiser? Yer a lifer. Me, I'm up for parole in five years. I'm gonna be back on my feet in no time, and you'll never see a day outside of this -"

"But I am your intellectual superior, and that is the truly important part!" That had to be Dr. Drakken. Nobody else could intone like an Oscar host with their windpipe about to be crushed.

Everyone's favorite band of neo-Nazis were the culprits this time. The leader juggled a barbel while the rest formed a cloud around Drakken and spewed toxic waste in his face. No one could talk dirtier than those guys.

Judging by the terrified bulge of Drakken's eyes, he wasn't used to "conversations" where every other word was NC-17. His tiny hands slashed at the air, as if curling and punching hadn't occurred to them.

How was this guy supposed to survive in here again?

Mason barged into the center of the group and broke it apart with his arms. "All right, what's going on here, boys?"

He rested both hands on his belt, and suddenly the swearing fell silent. The fists came unclenched, and a beyond-ashen Drakken dropped.

"I'm sure it couldn't possibly have anything to do with these lovely little 'White Supremacy' pins I'm pretty sure we've confiscated before? Several times?" Mason said. He held out his palm and waited as, one by one, the dinky little pieces of hate clinked into it.

That was when he spotted the handmade pin hanging crookedly from Drakken's lapel. It sported his mugshot, a panorama of the globe in the background, and the words, "Blue Supremacy."

It was the first reason Mason had had to smile in hours.

To be fair, he confiscated it, too.

"Yeah? Does it feel good to get people punished, ya little pansy?" The leader shoved the barbell straight into Drakken's chest, knocking him up against the water fountain. A stream of water sloshed loose and soaked Drakken's collar. "You gonna go cry to the guards the way you used to go crying to your mommy? Or did you ever stop?"

Something deeply malevolent glittered under Drakken's furry eyebrow. For the first time, Mason could imagine him as the mastermind behind the Diablo attack. The playing field would've been evened at the very least if there'd been a sliver of cybertronic technology within reach.

"I am no pansy," Drakken said. The boom he spit now was raw, likely the only thing that kept his volume low. "I've killed before."

"That's enough." Crawley got his arms around the leader and yanked him back several steps.

Drakken glared the supremacists down until they were specks in Mason's vision. The instant they were gone, he collapsed back against Mason's chest and blew out breaths that knocked together as badly as his knees were.

It was Mason who pulled casually away and straightened Drakken's curved-in legs. There was no room in Dr. Drakken's ever-shriveling credibility for clinging to a guard.

"All right, our time is up," Sykes announced from across the room. "Let's hit the showers before dinner."

A cacophony of jeers rose up. Drakken, for once, remained silent. Mason watched his Adam's apple jerk painfully up and down.

* * *

Once they were disrobed for the showers, Drakken didn't _actually_ stand up and holler, "I'm naked and uncomfortable with that!" But he might as well have. Every line on his body was drawn in toward the center, shielding what Mason didn't wanna look at anyway.

Drakken could barely hold the soap between his fingers once they were lathered up, though he'd mastered the art of picking it up with only his toes. His rickety-looking backbone, layered with a sheet of pale skin, shook every time he stuck his hair under the showerhead and doused himself in warm water.

The snickering crowd of other men eyed him shamelessly. Not in that predatory way all the guards had been trained to be on the lookout for - in an ultra-macho, show-us-what-you-got way. No doubt they were taking bets on how many blows it would take to KO him. . . or something worse.

Mason had never seen anyone hurry quite that fast through a shower. The walls had barely had a chance to get wet before Drakken was squeaking the faucet off again and jiggliing in place, arms folded above the ribs that stood in plain sight. Mason handed him a towel, intentionally looking him square in the eye. Whatever was trembling in there, Drakken gulped it back.

Drakken plunged his face into the towel like that could shield the rest of his bare self, too. To his right, Lucre was also finishing up a shower, heading for Mason, still yakking at a thousand words per minute. Mason swerved to collect another towel for him.

And that was when he heard the flick, the snap, and the gravel screech.

Mason whipped back around to see the prisoner appropriately known as Nasty Niles brandishing the drenched, rolled-up towel straight out of every bad prison movie. Smirking over the six-inch, pure-pink lash on Drakken's lower back. The darts Drakken glared back at him could have been powerful, in another time, another place, locked safely behind one of his weapons for support.

Niles jutted his long neck toward Drakken. "You better watch it, girly. There's more where that came from."

To Drakken's credit, he only cowered for a half second - but it was long enough for Niles to catch. It was the only thing that registered in his empty excuse for a grin anymore.

"You _can't_ be serious." With what Mason could feel as an expression worth a hundred holster-grabs, he dodged Drakken, stalked up to Niles, and relieved him of the towel. "What are you, a sophomore?"

Niles gave him a pretty colorful cussing-out.

As if Mason cared. He hustled Drakken's clenched-up form across the floor to his cellmate. Drakken might've sooner hacked off his own ears than listen to any more of Lucre's blabber, but at the very least Lucre wasn't volunteering to lop them off _for_ him.

Drakken's frustrated grunt-retches saturated the room. One last glance at him showed him to be simultaneously a sophomore himself and a killer.

* * *

Mason's last duty before he clocked off was to announce lights out. That was good for the usual catcalls and obscenities he paid no attention to.

Dr. Drakken was right at his cell door at the end of the hall, gripping the bars with bloodless fingertips. "Why does it have to be 'lights out'" - those same fingertips twitched in mockery - "so early? Eh?" Drakken's normally deep pitch was reaching heights Mason wouldn't have thought possible.

"It's ten-thirty PM, Dr. Drakken," Mason replied.

"My point exactly! It's hardly the middle of the night!" Drakken straightened up as if he could catch his voice before it hit the ceiling. "Think of it this way! The longer you extend the day shift, the more you get paid. Don't you think you deserve a little more compensation for all your hard work?"

He was all but batting his eyelashes.

"I'm touched by your concern," Mason said dryly, "but regulations say I gotta end the day shift before the clock strikes eleven. And I didn't land this job by breaking regulations, ya know?"

"Then let _me_ stay up - and assist you!" Drakken cried.

Mason squinted at him in surprise. The eyes that had so resolutely turned away that morning locked straight onto Mason's now. He was restraining the wetness from spilling over but not having the same luck with the angst that spewed out of them, peering around the remains of a wall that had no defenses left by this hour.

The arrowhead forming in Mason's gut wanted to sit down with the poor dude, give him some advice. Redirect him before he burned himself completely out. But to do it right here, right now, would only make his life suck even more.

"No go, pal." Mason hooked his thumbs into his belt like he thought he had a riot on his hands. It was his only option to keep Dr. Drakken from becoming a midnight snack.

"Fine," Drakken said with a sharp inhale. He stalked, stiff-legged, over to his bunk and threw himself onto it with all the grace of a brick. "See if I ever offer to help _you_ again!"

A chorus of snickers rose from the peanut gallery.

Mason swallowed his own when Drakken rolled over onto his belly and sighed. "So, you have to start the night shift. . . _then_ could you stay?" Although he scowled at Mason, he wasn't wearing his the-rules-don't-apply-to-me look.

"For the thousandth time, _no_ ," Mason said, with more irritation than was actually standing his hair on end. Before Drakken could get out his next question, the question that was guaranteed to seal his fate if he asked it, Mason scoffed, "Somebody _else_ will come stay. We can't just leave you guys alone to break out, after all."

"If only," Drakken sniffed. He did slip into the uppity routine then, but it sagged on him the same way the jumpsuit did, built for someone bigger.

Mason switched off the first bulbs. By the light of a half-dozen more, he could see Dr. Drakken arranging himself into his usual near-fetal-position under the covers, sliding his underbite jaw around until you could hear it grinding. Steeling himself, Mason would've bet his nightstick, to face the lives he'd ended.

The guy deserved it, Mason supposed, but watching him shiver in his bed every night, knees coiled up to his chest like a baby with a bad case of colic, didn't give him a sense of satisfaction. It was almost sad.

Even sadder when you considered he'd probably be unreachable again in the morning.

* * *

They'd studied Greek mythology when Mason was a senior in high school. And ever since he'd first served as shadower to a group of old-pro prison guards, he'd been struck by the similarity between their justice system and the Greek afterlife.

The deceased stood before a judge, who weighed them on the scales of justice. Those whose soles were too heavy with their crimes were ferried off to Taratus, land of eternal punishment. Most of the writings on the place tended toward the dramatically gruesome, populated by maggots and rivers of fire and rotting flesh. Mason had always pictured it more in line with the rectangular, gray inside of a fed pen, crowded and lonesome and reeking with every kind of evil.

It was no wonder the fights never stopped. What more did a felon have to lose? The guys in here were always going after each other with anything contraband they could get their mitts on - and were pretty skilled with making weapons out of the stuff they _were_ allowed to have. Batteries inside socks, anyone? The crowd, meanwhile, would salivate, if for no other reason than that they were glad not to be involved.

A fair fight could be broken up in a matter of minutes.

Then again, if these guys fought fair, they wouldn't be in prison in the first place, would they?

An unfair fight usually meant hustling one party off to the infirmary, the other into solitary confinement, paperwork, hoopla, potential lawsuits, all kinds of junk. And they could seriously start in five seconds.

That was how long Mason turned his back at lunch break one day late in June. He hadn't even refilled his coffee mug before the chant of "Fight! Fight! Fight!" oozed from the center of the room to its corners, passing from one man to the next, gaining in volume and intensity and sadistic glee.

Mason had grown so used to tuning out Frugal Lucre's nasal, never-ending voice that it took him a second or two to catch his frenzied cries.

An hour seemed to pass from when Mason dove into the mob and began elbowing his way through to the moment he emerged into the clearing that had been formed to serve as a makeshift gladiator arena. The entire distorted time, he was hoping he was wrong.

He wasn't.

Dr. Drakken lay crumpled on the ground like a discarded wooden soldier, his weak face sickly gray. His eyes were closed; he was breathing, but much too quickly. His fingers, relaxed in unconsciousness, had fallen away from a gash in the sleeve of his jumpsuit, and out of it blood frantically tried to choose a direction.

One of the white supremacists towered over him, the razor blade he twirled between his fingers glinting as if it were a sword. He didn't go in for the kill. He just stood there, grinning, even as Lucre straddled his shoulders and pounded both fists on top of his buzz cut.

The mass of prisoners throbbed for more.

Mason had seen way worse wounds. Drakken wasn't in any danger of bleeding to death - the cut was longer than it was deep. The arrow that shot through Mason wasn't one of anxiety.

He picked up the nearest wad of napkins and soaked them against Drakken's cut with firm-pressured hands. Too slippery with Drakken's blood to hold his own walkie-talkie, Mason turned to Hayes and barked, "Call the doctor!"

Hayes was already dialing before the last syllable was out.

Meanwhile, the beefy Crawley peeled Lucre, who couldn't have been an inch thick except in the belly, off Neo-Nazi, confiscated the razor, and wrenched Neo-Nazi's wrists behind his back - all in about one motion. He'd been doing this a lot longer than Mason. You couldn't help but admire the guy.

Then there were other pairs of arms beside Mason's, lifting Dr. Drakken's shrunken frame off the frigid floor and hauling him back toward his cell. "Tell me again why we provide medical care for these scum," Sykes muttered on his right.

Mason shrugged. Sykes was another set of arms - that was all that mattered.

They spread Drakken out flat on his cot. Mason poured antiseptic onto a cotton ball and was sponging away the infection waiting to happen on Drakken's arm when Doc MacIntosh appeared on the scene, suture in hand.

Halfway through the process, Drakken started talking from whatever underworld he was in. Shattered fragments of nightmares mixed with the plots of some '70s Marvel comics - amid calls for Shego. _Lots_ of calls for Shego. The man who'd been so ruthless in his launching of the Diablos was nowhere to be seen in this puny package.

DocIntosh had just snipped the last stitch off when Drakken's eyes twitched beneath the lids and then flew open. "Shego?" he squawked.

Sykes laughed with an edge of spit. "Not exactly."

The whites took a minute to track behind their bloodshot lines. "What - what happened?" Drakken asked.

"You were injured in a fight," DocIntosh explained. His voice was as unrattled as Drakken's was about to shake the rafters.

Drakken's brow furrowed into painful-looking ridges.

It shouldn't have taken too long to hash out what they'd heard from Lucre and the other witnesses - that one of the white-supremacy gang had slammed Drakken on the head with his lunch tray, giving the other the chance to slip in and slice Drakken's arm. _Shouldn't_ have.

Drakken was being his usual feisty self and had to interrupt for a claim that he could have fought off the whole dang prison if he hadn't been weak from blood loss, even as he came up off the pillow and immediately sank back down, lips turning green. Now that the guy was awake, his menace made a mostly successful effort to slide back into place. Obvious thoughts of revenge tightened his face into something Mason wouldn't have been crazy about meeting in a dark alley.

But anyone half as keen and cunning as Drakken pretended to be could see that he was a dead man walking if he tried anything now.

Before Mason could nip it right in the bud, DocIntosh spoke up again. "You're actually very lucky."

"Lucky?" The word volleyed from Drakken's mouth and seemed to splinter as soon as it hit the air.

"That he didn't hit an artery or a vein," DocIntosh said.

Mason couldn't hold back a grunt this time. "Wasn't aiming for one. He was just trying to scare you."

"W-w-w-well, it w-w-w-won't work," Drakken said. The skin below his eyes inched upward. He rubbed at it, what remained of his stumpy fingernails clotted with dried blood.

Another arrow pierced Mason, and he sunk onto the cot beside Drakken. "Maybe it should. If a guy like this wanted you dead, you'd be dead."

Drakken's eyes were about to leap from their sockets. In Mason's brain, the dude's face seemed to scroll back decades, until it was wearing horn-rimmed glasses and a furry ridge between his eyebrows. He woulda had about as much chance in high school as he did in here.

One more lost soul floating down the river of Tartarus.

Sykes, of course, had to put his two cents in about how much better it would be if Mr. White Pride _had_ killed Drakken.

Mason threw out an arm that turned out not to be needed. Drakken just hung his head so low, all Mason could see were the uneven spikes of his hair, wilting at his collar.

"All right. You know what?" Mason turned and met Sykes's hatred with his own calm. "You're not needed here anymore."

Sykes sent another crippling glare Drakken's way and looked more than happy to get the heck outta Cell Block D.

"He hates me," Drakken said much later, after a tetanus shot had been plugged into his other arm and DocIntosh had picked up his things and left.

Mason gave Drakken a sideways glance to see if that was honestly some type of hurt in his voice. He was perched on the corner of the cot, wrapped in the covers. He seemed to have lost more weight since Mason had last seen him, and that was only two days ago.

"Yeah, he does," Mason said. "But it's hard to blame him." He paused. "His cousin was in one of the skyscrapers that fell."

"Is - is - did - he - is -" Drakken stammered.

Frank in a hospital bed did battle with the immediacy of the eyes that gaped into his. Haunted. Terrified. Guilty.

 _Remorse._

Mason snapped it up as if it were the last available parking space. "He's alive. They don't know if he'll walk again."

Drakken began to laugh the way he threw up: violently, dizzily, completely out of his control. There was a gleeful note in it, maybe even a relieved one. "Oh, is _that_ all?"

Thank the _stars_ Sykes wasn't still listening. He'd have slit Drakken's throat right there.

As it was, Mason's ears didn't ring quite loud enough for him to miss the desperate sound of a man going into shock. He put a hand on Drakken's arm and applied the same pressure he'd used to stop the bleeding. "Drakken. Stop. Just stop," Mason said, surprised at the gentleness he was able to find.

Drakken stopped. He blushed a deeper pink than he had the first time he'd been asked to disrobe for the showers. And when his eyes said, "I've killed before," they weren't bragging this time.

They belonged to a person who understood his imprisonment was his own fault. Someone who was lugging around a responsibility he'd never learned how to carry.

Someone who could be reached.

Drakken's body seemed to fold around his hollowed-out stomach. "Would - would you believe it was mostly an accident?"

The attack? Never.

The deaths?

Mason went back to the footage of a snarling Drakken being ushered into the back of a paddy wagon less than an hour after the attack was foiled. Once they'd gotten to the police station, he hadn't been able to stop blinking, like he'd stepped into a stark pool of reality out of a little boy's twisted fantasy.

Where the world was conquered, and somehow no one died.

" _I_ would," Mason said.

"There was just supposed to be chaos - and destruction - and terrible, horrible fear!" The Oscar announcer was gone. Drakken whimpered, spiraled down into, "I - I didn't mean - I couldn't - I wasn't meant to be a killer."

"Drakken, _none_ of us are meant to be killers," Mason said. He didn't have to force himself to sound understanding. At the very least, he understood enough to want to understand the rest.

Anything so Taratus didn't get the final say.

* * *

"No, for the last time, I am _not_ letting you out!"

Mason pressed a palm against the wall, thinly padded just enough to avoid the feel of a padded room, and met the filmy stare of Dr. Drakken. His cheeks were salt-stained as he looked up at Mason from where he was lying on the bare bed, stripped of anything he could've twisted into a noose. After so many sobbing, barfing fits, Drakken had to have wrung himself dry by now.

Well, a guy could hope, couldn't he?

"You really think _this_ " - Mason gestured to their cramped surroundings - "is the solution?"

"Shego hasn't come for me." Drakken's words were sluggish, the way they'd been ever since Mason had entered the solitary cell, taken an uncomfortable plastic seat, and locked his eyes on Drakken. Mason got the feeling Drakken wasn't totally sold on dying. He was just desperate to get out of the life he'd been sentenced to.

Maybe that was what had happened to Uncle Harold, too - living alone, counting the days since his last fix, rarely venturing into town to have soccer moms hustle their families away from the _ex-con_ , the _recovering addict_.

The coroner had declared the cause of death to be heart failure, but Mason had been watching true-crime shows ever since he was a little kid, and he knew autopsies could be _way_ more specific than that. Mom and Dad never pressed it any further. Didn't care enough or cared too much - who could say?

Anybody with a working set of parts upstairs could see that it had been an overdose. Accidental? On-purpose? An answer wouldn't have helped.

The only memory Mason had of a living Uncle Harold was a twitchy-faced guy at the family reunion who'd glued his model airplane back together when all the other adults were too busy.

"She's been broken out already. Twice!" Drakken finally continued. He could twitch with the best of the junkies, but right now he was morbidly still except for the tremor in his hands. "And she hasn't come back for me. I - I don't understand what she's doing, or why her saviors haven't come back for me, either. We're partners, after all - no, scratch that! I'm the boss, and she's just the sidekick! Why - why won't she come? Why won't anyone come?"

It was the fiftieth time he'd said it, and the first without rage.

"And if she doesn't bust me out, then I'm done for." Mason could hear the tightness, as if Dr. Drakken's stomach were full of its own arrows. "I've been sentenced to spend the rest of my life in this -" He swore and punched a fist to his mouth. "Sorry. You pick it up from the guys in here."

Apologizing? The dude had been one psychoanalysis away from Death Row and now he was _apologizing_ for one tiny cuss word?

"But you know what I mean!" With what looked like great effort, Drakken raised himself up on one elbow. " _The rest of my life_ , whatever that means. However long it is. So I figure, why not just get 'life' over with?"

In a warped way, he made sense. The arrow that lodged in Mason was chilled.

"This doesn't have to be the end, Drakken," Mason said. " _Lots_ of people have turned their lives around in prison. Artists, authors, musicians..."

"I'm not any of those things," Drakken said. His shoulders weren't fixed anymore. They sank so far down, the already-considerable length of his arms dangled like a gorilla's. "The only thing I ever was is a chemist, and they won't let me mess with chemicals in here!"

"That sucks majorly, doesn't it?" Mason said. _No duh_ wasn't what you used with a guy on Suicide Watch.

"That's an eon's worth of understatement!" Drakken was winding up toward his usual animation, fingers flailing toward the air. "You can't do chemistry experiments, the water fountain sprays you right in the nose, your cell mate won't shut up, everyone else - everyone else, you get maimed if you look away from them for half a second, the food is terrible, the cots are lumpy, you have to do bathroom things right out there in the open, you have to watch your failed scheme every night on the news, and you're the furthest thing in the world from an all-powerful ruler! Who _wouldn't_ want to kill themselves?"

There was a hum as the air conditioning kicked on.

Drakken pulled his borderline-malnourished legs up to his chest. "What do you care, anyway?" he muttered into his knees. "Shouldn't you _want_ me dead?"

Mason glanced at him, the savage accidental killer who'd been worn down to a curled-up, pitiable bag of bones. The only reason he'd want him dead would be to put him out of his misery.

"I don't," he said.

"Why not?" Drakken demanded.

"Doesn't matter." Mason did his best to shrug. "I'm not a deity, Drakken. I'm not even a judge. It's not my job to decide who lives and who dies."

He headed over to the AC to close the vents off - his charge was shaking bad enough already. He called back, "And have you ever considered what happens _after_ you die, pal?"

Drakken's skin went an even pastier shade.

"Yeah, exactly," Mason said.

"And I suppose you have the answers for me?" The reply was probably supposed to be poisoned with scorn, though Drakken had frozen into a clutch.

Mason shook his head. "Nope. I don't. But if you can't answer yourself - and be totally sure - it's definitely in your best interest to cancel that one-way ticket you're trying to buy." He himself didn't believe in rivers of fire and all that crud, but whoever was gonna weigh Drakken's soul in the afterlife would have a lot to forgive.

Drakken swallowed. Mason watched his Adam's apple hike up and down like any other thirteen-year-old kid's.

"At any rate," Mason said, "people _would_ miss you."

A trail of mucus blew out as Drakken snorted. "Like who?" he snarled into the Kleenex Mason handed him.

"Your Shego, for one thing."

"Really?" Drakken tried to scoff, but it fell apart. "You honestly think she'd _miss_ me? Why?"

"You're loyal to her, and you expect loyalty in return," Mason said. He squeaked the chair legs closer to Drakken's cot. "That's a pretty rare find for a supervillain."

"We all take care of each other!" Drakken said. His eyes clicked away to a stain on the ceiling. "When we aren't trying to kill each other."

If they'd been anywhere else, Mason would've burst out laughing.

"Well, whatever you say, pal," he said instead. "She may be having a good time doing heaven-knows-what out there, but I'd bet you that once all that wears off, she'd miss having you around to liven things up."

Drakken's forehead creased, and it stayed that way. The skin that had been baby-smooth when he'd first shipped over was newly marked with crinkles and stress lines.

For an instant, Mason considered saying, _I'D miss you_. It wasn't every day you got to work with a con who was loath to spit swear words from the corners of his virgin lips or whose bluster was childish enough that you could smile at it. That'd definitely sound like he was scraping the bottom of the barrel for examples, though.

Mason went with the most glaringly obvious. "There's your mother."

Tears immediately sparkled on Drakken's lower eyelashes. "My mother," he breathed, in a softer voice than Mason had ever heard him use. "I can't leave my mother. I'm all she has left after -" He stopped abruptly and swung away from Mason, who felt pretty close to a rookie surgeon about to make his first incision.

He probed the spot gently with his scalpel, asking, "After. . . ?"

"My father left, okay?" Drakken's sides heaved. "He was constantly telling me I had to grow up and be a man, and I guess I didn't do it sufficiently. . . and so he left when I was just a kid!"

Dead silence rang in the air.

Mason puffed a sigh. Fathers had done much crueler things to some of the dudes in here, things that made Drakken's childhood sound like a cakewalk. But if he pulled your standard _suck it up, be a man_ , he might as well push Drakken off a bridge himself.

"So that screwed you up some, huh?" he said.

Drakken looked as if he were gonna try to be tough, and in the end he didn't have the strength to. He nodded, everything on him crumpling.

Crawley broke the tension by walking up and rapping his knuckles against the glass door. He shouted to be heard through it - "Mason! You're off the clock in forty-five minutes, okay?"

Thank goodness. The last three hours had crawled by slower than Dad's vintage Tin Lizzie, and Mason was sure he was just about as drained as the light-blue face looking back at him.

Mason rose and stretched a kink from his back. "Who's on duty next?" he asked.

"Sykes," Crawley said.

The arrow shot into Mason's throat. _Sykes_? The guard who probably truly did want Drakken dead? Heaven knew what he'd say in a soundproof room, facing the suicidal man who'd cut down his cousin.

Mason threw a glance back to Drakken. He was still curved onto one side as if to preserve whatever heat was left in him. The name apparently meant nothing to him yet.

A surge of anger at the both of them went through the arrow. If Frank had been more than just an occasional drinking buddy to him, would Mason still care if Drakken died? If Sykes's pain had been his, would it have turned him unprofessional and vengeful, too?

Mason had no idea. All he knew was they couldn't leave Sykes alone with Drakken.

"Hey, you know what?" Mason called back to Crawley. "Sykes's had a rough couple months. Why don't we give him the night off? I can take another shift."

"But the paperwork - " Crawley protested.

Mason waved a hand. "Bring it in, and I'll take care of it. Seriously, I don't mind."

Nah, he minded. But it wasn't worth a man's life.

Drakken came out of his clenched-up ball just long enough to shoot Mason a look of surprise. His eyebrow came out of its glower and lifted with the faint first stirrings of hope.

Progress. Who knew how much more they could make in three hours?

* * *

The night a giant green alien woman busted in the prison ceiling and made off with Dr. Drakken, Mason was convinced you could kiss all progress goodbye.

* * *

The night the giant green alien woman returned with her even bigger husband to enslave the planet was basically a repeat of Diablo Night. Alarms, sirens, security breaches, escape attempts, surviving on pure adrenaline.

At the crack of dawn, the crunches and the screaming from outside went still out of nowhere. When Mason and his colleagues crept to a hole in the wall, the alien machines had fallen uselessly to the ground, entangled by vines out of _Little Shop of Horrors_.

Power came back on not too long after that. Mason wasn't sure whether to be relieved or dismayed by the news that there'd be no new prisoners tonight - the aliens had died in battle. That, he figured, would be the biggest difference from Diablo Night. There would still be the nightmarish insurance forms, the cost of repairs, the chaos of rebuilding -

The newscaster cut him off with, "I'm Kate Winchester, and we are live with the heroes who saved the world from hostile alien forces." The camera panned back, and Mason wasn't surprised to see Kim Possible and her blond boyfriend hugging in the worst of the rubble.

Another figure stood behind them, tapping his fingertips together, spastic-style. For some reason, this hero was wearing some sort of flowered headdress, but Mason would've known those nervous tics anywhere.

And when Kate Winchester held out her microphone and said, "Dr. Drakken, how does it feel knowing you've saved the world?", all thoughts of damage costs joined the alien machines in the dust.

* * *

The dull breeze of a portable fan blew across Mason as he sipped lukewarm coffee and massaged his half-melted muscles. The AC system had been totaled in the invasion, and priority went to the units in the prison itself - after all, giving a bulky, blade-spinning fan to a convicted second-degree murderer? Nothing could _possibly_ go wrong there. Not to mention the way the place got to smelling in the summertime.

Contractor had said he'd have the guards' unit fixed in a week or so, with any luck before the August heat reached its worst. That had given Sykes plenty of material for his usual grumbles about the bureaucracy and the perps coming first, but Mason had noticed the pleats around his mouth didn't run quite so deep these days. Something about knowing you'd cheated death twice would do that to a guy. That and the progress Frank was making with his new wheelchair.

Even with the hum of the fan, the air was so still and slow that Mason could hear Crawley flipping himself a game of Solitaire and some fly's obnoxious buzzing. Mason was up and going for the swatter when he heard a knock at the door.

The heck? None of the guards needed to knock, and visiting hours weren't for another two days. Had to be the dude who worked the front desk, a kid who came back so infrequently Mason had never gotten around to learning his name, and it was never a good sign when he showed up.

Mason jerked his head up toward the slit of a window. It was the desk dude, all right. Standing next to him was a slender man in a double-breasted blue coat, his spine held straighter than Mason had ever seen it. Only the fidgeting of his bony fingers gave him away.

It was Dr. Drakken.

The guy was trying to stand his feet hip-distance apart, but his hips so were narrow he was forcing himself into a bow-legged position. His black-smudged eyes were suddenly glassy and shy, no hint of the 'tude he'd spent his entire sentence miserably failing to pull.

Mason twisted the doorknob until he got a gap he could wedge his foot into and push the door open. The top-notch cuffs he wore on his belt loops wouldn't have restrained his grin.

"Dr. Drakken!" he said. "What a surprise! It's good to see you again."

Drakken's eyes immediately pooled.

Not an unfamiliar sight. Before they could spring a leak, Mason slid an arm around him and ushered him into the guards' bathroom, the one Drakken had bugged Mason to let him use for months on end. Guy didn't appreciate having to pee - or worse - in front of every other prisoner in the place. You could hardly blame him for that.

It was a wired Drakken who bounced from one foot to other, wiggling the leg he wasn't currently standing on like there were spiders inside it. Someone Mason had only seen glimpses of in the half-starved punk under his watch. But it wasn't just nerves revving him up now. There was some sort of hope in it, too.

"I had a speech prepared." Drakken reached into his lab coat and withdrew a fistful of notecards, the edges poking haphazardly in all directions. He cleared his throat over the one on top and read - as if he were onstage - "So, in conclusion, I would like to say. . . oh, pish-posh! These are all out of order! I can hardly use _that_ for an opener!"

 _Pish-posh._ Was this man for real?

Drakken said, "Whatevs," going from grandma to preteen in two seconds flat, and tossed the cards behind him, where they flapped in pairs to the ground. Mason would've asked him to pick them up if it wouldn't have involved guffawing in the dude's face.

The toe of Drakken's black boot dug timidly into the linoleum. "So. . . I suppose you've heard that I saved the world?"

"Kinda hard to miss. Especially with your flower show there."

A pink circle appeared on either side of Drakken's nose. "Oh, that's a story so long it wouldn't even fit on my notecards. Abridged edition is - I had a lab accident, gained planet powers, and defeated the aliens using my flowers!" He shrugged. "At first, I sort of wished I had a more manly superpower, but I can't complain."

 _Oh, sure you can, pal,_ Mason thought. _Better than any other inmate I ever knew._

"And I also didn't like the idea of being the one who 'saved the world'." Drakken shaped quotation marks with his fingers and executed an eye-roll that put teenage drama queens to shame. "But - I did what I had to do. Because. . . well, because. . ."

Mason waited, his breath frozen in his throat.

". . . because I saw what world domination looked like. From the other side. I mean, not the 'Other Side' like you see on _Ghost Therapist_ , but - but - but - the -"

Mason's "I know what you mean, bud," sounded tinny to his own ears. His focus was on Drakken's next words, should he ever manage to get them out.

He did, in a carefully controlled wail. "And you were right, sir. It was hideous. Gruesome, I guess you can say, although I didn't see any. . . blood." The wail wavered. "There was just destruction all over the place, homes being trampled and cars exploding and people's possessions being thrown all over the place like so much garbage, and the aliens were laughing and smiling and they didn't care except to be proud of themselves!"

The curl in Drakken's lip didn't snap into place once he continued with, "I never wanted to become that. Even if I maybe already possibly had. And my arch-nemesis - Kim Possible - you know her?"

"Of course." Mason smiled again - hard not to when you thought of that little spitfire girl, newly graduated from high school and already an old pro at the crime-fighting business. She wasn't hard-boiled, though, not a Sykes-in-training. World needed more young people like her.

"I thought I'd blown her up." Drakken whispered it, wincing as if he'd reopened the wound on his arm. "It was an accident - you know, for once - and all I could think was that I'd finally - _killed_ her, and it didn't feel at all like I'd imagined it would. It felt. . . gross."

And there went the vocabulary.

"So I vowed I would do whatever I could to make things right," Drakken said. "You have to understand, at that point I was sure I was going to be fried myself anytime now. But I wasn't going to go down without a fight."

"That's the spirit," Mason said. Each arrow he'd collected over the past nine months, a whole fleet of them from the night spent on Suicide Watch, dissolved into a patch of warmth. It was the first moment in his career that despair hadn't felt bricked into the walls themselves.

Dr. Drakken wanted to live.

And live right, from the sound of it. The dude's body was slanted forward, eager and intent with the rest of it.

"So - Kim Possible turned out not to be dead after all and we broke each other out and found Shego and Kim's boyfriend and we all saved the world together but most of it was me!" Drakken blurted out, as if he were being graded on time. "Then I realized. . . I was still alive, and I'd still made that vow. So - no more supervillainy for me."

 _Thank you._

"I've got a - a job now." Drakken grinned again, wrapping himself in a hug. "And not just any job. I'm with Global Justice now!"

That was all over the news already, but Mason decided to say what had gone through his head when he'd first heard it: "Get out. Global Justice?"

"Scout's Honor," Drakken said, crossing two fingers and tapping his chest with them. "Well, I was never a Scout, but you get the gist. And speaking of _Ghost Therapist_ , I've got one, too. A therapist, that is, not a ghost. To have a ghost, I'd have to be dead, and we've already established that I'm alive and well."

 _Very_ well. Mason let Drakken ramble, like the guy had been born to do, while he studied him. Even though Drakken's voice trembled, and his hands with it, there was barely a trace of the cowering little inmate whose threats were the biggest thing about him.

Drakken's eyes were lively again and clear of everything except a sheen of moisture. He'd filled out some - tough to say how much under the obvious padding of his clothes, but the cheeks were back to round and dimly freckled as if he'd actually seen the light of day at some point. Lost the constant tic of those chronically about to hurl. Even his shaggy black hair looked more at ease, caught back in its handsome tail.

And it took a lot of guts to come back and admit he'd been wrong, especially back _here_. Even just voluntarily approaching this place again must have been like sticking his head in a lion's mouth.

A strange sense of pride swept through Mason.

"I've spent the whole summer flying around the world," Drakken said, "apologizing to everyone I ever hurt." He grimaced. "Which will probably take the better part of forever. I'd almost forgotten how many lives I messed up. I visited your friend - the mean one - "

"Sykes?"

"I suppose." Drakken tilted his head of spikes. They were more kid-like than ever without the stress lines ridging up to meet them. "I apologized to him for hurting his cousin and asked if there were anything I could do to make it up to him. He cussed at me and told me to go away and leave his family alone."

Mason nodded with what he knew had to be a grimace of his own. "I'm not surprised. Sykes is a grudge-holder if there ever was one. But you did the right thing."

Judging by how Drakken all but fainted across a sink, it had been decades since he'd heard something like that directed at him.

"But forgiving is hard," Drakken said. "I sort of understand. There are a bunch of people whose guts I still thoroughly despise, but I'm working on forgiving them because I don't want that to turn me into a supervillain again. . ." He paused for some of the air he'd probably been denying himself for the last ten minutes. "I think I'll be working on _that_ the rest of my life. But I'd rather do it out there than in here. No offense," he added, cringing. "You run a perfectly lovely pen -"

Mason _had_ to guffaw at that. "None taken," he said. "Seriously, it's okay, Drakken. I know you'd have to be nuts to want to come back here."

"But I _did_ want to come back here!" Drakken cried, his arms waving like windmills. "That's what I told Shego: 'Take me back to prison.' I wanted to show you how far I've come!" He nudged at the linoleum again. "And I wanted to thank you."

"Thank me?" was all Mason could think to say.

"Yes." Drakken straightened from retrieving his notecards and glanced at them as if that alone could jog his memory. "It may not have seemed like it at the time, but you made a huge difference to me when I was in. . . in here."

No, it _hadn't_ seemed like it at the time, not with the self-absorbed man Mason had first met, who'd spent his whole term snarling at everyone and everything and scheming some twisted revenge ploy. Gratitude hadn't even been on Drakken's radar back then.

"How so?" Mason had to ask.

"You treated me like I was a human being. Not some plague-infested flea. . ." Drakken gave a suspiciously juicy cough and fanned his face. "I can do this, I really can. . . A human being who had done something very, very wrong, but you always kept telling me there was more to me than there'd been on Di - on that night."

Mason remembered that as well as he did the first bewildered moment when Drakken had been brought in. He'd never seen pure evil before - though he'd had some pretty close cases - but he doubted it would have to be carried in smelling of puke and using up all its reserve to keep from bawling. It was the contradiction within almost all crooks, and it was one of the main reasons this amazing job could suck so bad.

But here was Drakken, tapping his fingertips together and daring to share his soft underbelly. "See, the thing was. . . I didn't really know that back then. I'd thrown so much into the Dia - into the plan that when it fell apart, I couldn't see anything left of me." He flipped through his notecards again. "You didn't let the other guys pick on me. You looked me in the eye. You helped me when my arm - errr, when it needed help."

"How's that doing, anyway?" Mason said.

"Oh, it's all healed! Well, as healed as it's ever going to be with my weird skin." Drakken chirped it, surprisingly cheerfully, and the thin, dark scar he rolled up his sleeve to show off like a Purple Heart wasn't half as nasty as Mason had been expecting.

When the sleeve slid back down, though, Drakken's blinks came twice as fast as normal. "Most of all - I wanted to thank you for - for - for maybe saving me. I was ready to - um - and you didn't let me - um - and you stayed with me - and you talked to me - " He lifted his gaze to Mason's. There was a gloss over it. "And I realized somebody in the world didn't want me dead."

Mason refused to let himself speak. He hadn't betrayed this kind of emotion on the job before, and he wasn't gonna start now. He just offered Drakken a smile from deep down in the place where he'd first felt arrows for him.

"And you had no reason to care whether or not I lived," Drakken said. His voice had thickened, chopping his words into husky bursts. "Except that you were a decent person, and you didn't want to see even someone like me die. It - it helped me get through a lot in here, even if I sort of lost it when I got back out. A lot of over-stimulation, you see, and old habits and - I shouldn't make excuses, should I? Still learning."

"Fine with me," Mason said. It was more than fine, actually - he found himself fascinated. The dude was actually growing into a responsible human being right before his eyes. Mason couldn't have been more impressed if he'd offered to scrub the prison toilets.

Drakken scratched at his earlobe. "Your friend - the Sykes guy - not a very nice person, may I just say - he told me that a lot of people were dead because of me. And you know what Shego said?"

Mason shrugged.

"She said a lot of people were alive because of me, too." Drakken smiled - it was as shaky as a truce between two warring cell blocks, and it bordered on starstruck as he looked as Mason. "Which means a lot of people are also alive because of _you_. Since I saved them, and you saved me, and - and - and -"

Drakken's words had dissolved entirely by then. His face collapsed, and he let go. It had to be good for him, finally getting rid of all those tears, although Mason had never felt more awkward.

He did the only thing a halfway-nice prison guard could do. He offered his shoulder.

And Drakken soaked it.

Five minutes later, the guy was standing back up, slapping tears off his cheeks. But there was no vibe of "that never happened" coming off him. Drakken's puffy eyes beamed as he swung at Mason's arm in what was probably meant to be a playful punch. "Thanks, man," he said.

Talk about awkward. Something told Mason that Drakken had never done the bro-thing in his _life_ , but if he had to play the tough guy one last time to keep the rest of the tears at bay, Mason wasn't going to argue.

"Take care, Dr. Drakken," he said.

"You, too." Drakken sniffed noisily. "Keep - keep up the good work. There are lots of prisoners that need a guard like you. I mean, they need a guard, period, because otherwise they'll break out, but especially one like you. . ."

Mason clapped Drakken on the back. "I get it, pal. And you're welcome."

He watched Drakken's skittering stride back toward the metal detector and the heavy glass doors beyond it until the lab coat and ponytail were swallowed up by sunshine. For a second, the endless paperwork and protocols of the legal machine were the farthest thing from his mind.

A soul had escaped from Tarartus after all. Some mom - some shrill-voiced, redheaded lady who had faithfully shown up every visiting day - had her son back. Someday, he might be an uncle to some kid who'd need their model airplane fixed, and this time it would only be the beginning.

Mason grinned at the thought. And then he turned around and walked back toward his job, locking right into place like a freshly oiled gear.


	15. Into the Attic

**~Some of this stolen - err, _secretly borrowed_ \- from _Rewriting History_. This story assumes that scene never actually happened but that (at least some of) the information in it is accurate. **

**Enjoy!~**

The attic is smaller than he remembered it.

Well, actually, Dr. Drakken thinks as he stops on the top step to give it a proper scan, that isn't quite true. It's an optical illusion, same as when you take two circles that are the same size and surround one with much bigger circles and the other with itsy-bitsy ones. The attic only _looks_ smaller because he's a lot bigger than he was when he was little.

Not his finest display of intelligence. _Bigger than he was when he was little._ Shego could go to town on _that_ logic.

But what better is he supposed to manage, with a very pregnant sister-in-spirit making her slow way up the attic steps behind him? Drakken's never heard Shego huff and puff before, and her teeth grit at this infraction of her dignity. He knows she won't accept help, and yet Drakken has clung hard to some part of chivalry.

(The part that doesn't require you to wield a sword. He still bears the scars from when he last interacted with something that sharp. And he's not saying that for theatrics. He really does have a scar.)

Drakken lets his fingers trace the permanent stitching in his cheek and then unfolds them to offer Shego a hand up. She, as expected, swats it away, but there's a tiny sparkle in the corner of each eye, like sunlight reflecting off a windshield.

Seven months into it, and her whole body is glowing. Drakken never thought that the palest shade of green on the entire visible spectrum could ever look healthy, but with a gem-like sheen over it, it does now. Hubby says pregnancy "agrees with her." That's probably true - and even if Shego _did_ have a disagreement with her pregnancy, she'd be victorious. She always is.

Drakken's not sure what it's doing to _him_. At its simplest, it's doing wonders for Mother's "I'm the only one in my bridge group who doesn't have grandbabies" doldrums.

That, in turn, takes some of the pressure off him. He's counting the days until his uncledom is official, but Drakken's quite uncertain whether he'll be ready to be a father any time soon.

(Not that the baby's under any obligation to be born on its due date. Would just be very considerate, is all.)

"Well, here we are!" Mother claps her dainty little hands and then gestures around the attic - which, Drakken proudly notes, is much less dusty than any other attic he's ever visited. "You can have anything that catches your eye, honey."

Shego picks up an antiquated blue rattle and shakes it as if it's a maraca. "Seriously, Doc? You don't mind if I take your old baby stuff?"

Drakken "pfff!"s between his lips. "Oh, that old thing? Are you kidding? I don't even remember it! Besides," he adds, stealing a shy glance at Shego's swollen belly, "my little niece or nephew deserves the very best."

Shego muffles something sarcastic into the back of her wrist. There was a time when she would have cut into him with something along the lines of, _Riiiight. That's why you're offering me a bunch of a broken-down junk from four decades ago._

Drakken's able to wrinkle his nose and grin back at her. That's when he catches a flash of plastic-over-metal legs, suspended in midair, and his brain is invaded by flashbacks so worn and faint he's surprised they aren't rendered in sepia tone. Of himself, in a room that was once his nursery, kicking his dangling feet and crying, "Giddyup!" Leaning forward into some imagined wind until he could swear his hair was being blown back, for real.

Shego's child deserves that much joy and more.

"Ooh! There's an old rocking horse over there somewhere!" Drakken cries, tearing to the back of the attic and leaving his own words in the dust.

Part of Drakken wants to jump on the thing again for one last ride, but he's smart enough to tell it would likely collapse under him. It was not built for a grown man, even a not-especially-large one. Drakken is illusionarily (is that a word?) aware again of how everything appears to have shrunk.

And it's no trick of the mind how old this thing has gotten. Chipped-away paint. Wood yellowing underneath. Minimal  
rust, though. Nothing a good wire brush wouldn't fix.

Drakken gives it a fond pat on the nose instead.

"Okay, so what was this guy's name?" Shego says. "'Cuz I _know_ he had one."

It's too far back to remember. Drakken shakes his head and shrugs until his hearing's muffled by his shoulder pads.

"He called it 'Whoa Rocky,'" Mother supplies.

Yes. Yes, that does click somewhere.

Shego's mouth does its twitchy routine. "Clever."

"I was three, okay?" Drakken shoots back, a twinge of frustration at his throat. Shego still knows how to push his buttons, but at least none of them are self-destruct buttons anymore.

"You might have named it after Rocky the flying squirrel, Drewbie," Mother says. "Ohh, you _loved_ that cartoon when you were a toddler."

"Whoop! News flash!" Shego says with a snicker. "You really are old."

Drakken doesn't bristle, because she's still shining like a glowstick. She wouldn't be doing that if she were trying to be mean - at least not to him. Which is actually exactly the opposite of how things used to be, and he marvels for a moment at how far she's come, how far they've all come, molded into this makeshift family.

Shego rests one arm against Whoa Rocky's haunches. "Where'd you get it?"

Now that does download a memory, and Drakken's fingers freeze on the horse's painted-on mane. It would have been more dramatic if it were made of imitation hair for them to get tangled in, but he's not going for a Grammy or a Tony or a Douglas or whatever those stupid awards are called. "It was a gift from my grandparents," Drakken says, in a voice that comes out as stiff as the horse's legs.

"Oh."

Mother's an adequate distance away now, so Drakken lowers to a whisper and adds, "Not _her_ parents. The. . . the other guy's."

"Gotcha." Shego's lips stop twitching. The glow recedes. Awkwardness hangs in the air between them.

Thank heavens Mother calls from across the room, "Ohhh, _Drewbie_! Look who I found!"

Drakken is more than happy to scuttle over to her, only stumbling once. Well, okay, technically twice, but he didn't fall down the second time, so it doesn't count. Some squeaky sound comes out of him when he stops and looks at what - _who_ \- Mother is holding.

A stuffed animal. A monkey, or some similar species. Clothed in one of Mother's old dolly dresses. Flaccid neck from being carted around by it for years and years.

A chemical concoction of every element bathes Drakken. Some are sweet-smelling, even pleasant to the skin; others should not be touched under any circumstances. So much power in one little toy.

Shego's beside him - she moves fast for being two months away from giving birth - and the twitches are back. Drakken's so knotted that it doesn't occur to him to be embarrassed, not even when Shego says, "So. . . who's this?"

"Oh, _that_ was Mr. Cuddlelumps," Mother says - beaming. "Drewbie's very favorite."

His confidant. Oh, the secrets Mr. Cuddlelumps could tell - that hidden comic book he'd feared Mother wouldn't let him read, because it was about drugs. The wet bed that was conquered at four, came back at eight, and then stuck around until sixth grade.

"Now that sounds more like your usual naming style," Shego says.

Drakken nods. Maybe. He thinks he does, at any rate. It's his childhood he's seeing, acted back out as he gazes at Mr. Cuddlelumps, and he can't watch it again now that he knows how it ends. Sort of the same deal with _Romeo and Juliet_. Now _that_ was a particularly tragic tragedy. . .

Mother sets the monkey back down in his cardboard box, only right at the top of the heap. Drakken sidesteps him - it - a move that becomes much trickier when you're also hoping you don't _look_ like you're sidestepping anything. For the time being, it's probably just best if they avoid each other - you don't see butterflies clinging to old caterpillar habits once they have their wings, right?

There's some extended metamorphosis metaphor (whew, say _that_ ten times fast!) in his mind somewhere.

But there's also the end of _Toy Story 3_ , and he's beginning to feel soft in odd places. And doggone it, it's hard to remain scientific _or_ literary when that kicks in!

For instance, is that a note of jealousy he detects in Mr. Cuddlelumps's beady button eyes? Does he know that Drakken now finds comfort in the arms of another stuffed animal? Logically, Drakken can understand that he's moved on - very normal, very natural - and that of course Sir Fuzzymuffin the Second's face, matching his and lovingly knitted by his mother, is infinitely more precious to him than this thing.

Still, whatever childhood trauma he evokes, this is _Mr. Cuddlelumps_ , who was faithful through it all. Drakken cried so many tears into that poor monkey that he must have salt mines preserved in his fur. It's as though he's accidentally drawn two cards in that great universal board game they all play, and one says to move two steps forward while the other's informing him he's lost his next turn.

Wishing for a mental Lysol, Drakken snaps away from the box and the memories and allows himself a temporary chicken-out, following in Shego's footsteps. _She_ will not make him discuss his past. Any inquiry about her own lights up her hands faster than a mob of paparazzi. She's all about the present - and the future.

Which is why they're here in the first place. It's all about Baby Yet To Be Born's future.

Shego's sitting in a glow of sunlight striping in through the tilted Venetian blinds. She's still a sneaky little thing, more at home in the night, but the sun is kind to her as well.

Of course. Those big jungle cats slink around in the darkness and then warm up in sunbeams come daybreak.

Drakken sinks, less than gracefully, down beside her, allowing the sun to kiss him, too - not a physical kiss, so he's not blotching and stammering as he would be if anyone were _really_ trying to kiss him. Particles of light filter through the fabric of his lab coat and warm the knees he eases up to his chest.

One of his old onesies is spread across Shego's vanishing lap. _One of his onesies._ A giggle inches up Drakken's throat, and he seizes the opportunity. "Those used to be mine," he says, " _onesie_ upon a time."

Shego smiles as if she's having labor pains already. "Ya know, Dr. D, I think you _can_ be charged on 'assault with a deadly joke.'"

The fear that used to seize him in one big fist at the word "charged". . . doesn't anymore. Drakken takes a moment to appreciate that.

He leans forward and touches the pale-blue onesie that his skin now matches - no one saw _that_ coming in his babyhood! - and lets his fingers bat at the tiny footsie-booties that even _his_ feet can't fit in anymore. What's it like, anyway, being a baby? Surely it must be like the stretch of time when he first reformed, when the world was new and stirring and anxiety was reduced to mere cameo appearances.

"You can have them for your baby, though, if you want them, Shego," Drakken says. "If he's a boy, that is. Well, even if she's a girl - if you don't think she'll mind wearing blue - and I don't think she will, because she'll be -" he squints at the tag - "four to six months, so -"

Shego thrusts a palm toward him, her usual signal that he's spilling it all out at operatic lengths. He pauses to refill his lungs with air.

And that's when Shego says, "Oh-ho-ho. What do we have _here_?"

Amusement has taken full reign of her voice. Drakken squirms. The possibilities are limitless. Has she found the portrait of himself as a superhero that he did when he was six? An old yearbook bearing pictures of his bespectacled self? He's suspecting the latter, because the object she's cradling is flat and more-or-less square and -

"This book," Shego reads from the title page in a squeaky, gushy imitation of Mother, "is dedicated to the first two years in the life of Drew Theodore P. Lipsky."

No. It's worse. The baby book!

One of Drakken's vines snatches the book from Shego before she can explore any farther and brings it back with a thump against his chest. "I think I'll preview that first," he says with as much pleasantness as he can muster. "Just in case any pictures are - "

"Rated PG for little naked baby tushies?" Shego supplies.

"She-go!" _Now_ he blushes. To lessen the humiliation, he pretends he's on safari, searching for exotic animals to capture and tag. Not "tag" as in "You're it" - "tag" as in put a card behind their ear so you can always tell which one it is when you observe it in its natural habitat.

Drakken finds and tags a monkey - _Primaticus Cuddlelumpus_ \- and then turns his attention to minesweeping the book. Okay, so he's technically naked in the first picture, but it's a sonogram and you'd have to have incredi-vision just to be able to tell his head from his tail end. All clear, all clear, all clear, bubble bath - close call, all clear, whoops, they'll just skip that page. . .

And then he lands on a picture celebrating the commemoration of Whoa Rocky.

Not knocking a bottle of champagne against the side or anything. (That would be strange.) Just Grandma and Grandpa Lipsky standing in front of the horse. And far in the back, a tall man, smiling. Drakken forgot his father had ever done such a thing. Forgot his face had ever been anything but worry-taut.

In this picture, Richard Lipsky looked. . . like a new father. Exhausted. Happy. Proud.

The pang that whacks Drakken is blunt, not sharp, and as old as the universe itself. Or at least the great pyramids of Giza. Now there are some old _Giza_ s for you. He really should share that thought with Shego, but she just might call the police on the grounds of being attacked with bad puns after all -

Drakken realizes he's laughing and snorting and bubbling all at once. At one point, he put pride in his father's eyes. He can't even formulate a proper reaction to that.

It's good for an odd look from Shego, until she leans over and tracks his gaze with hers. Every angle on her face softens. It strikes Drakken that Shego's never seen his father before.

And that she still seems to recognize him.

"You wanna talk about any of it?" is all she says.

"No," Drakken says, sniffling and wiping his nasal area with his sleeve. "I am neither ready, willing, nor able."

Shego resumes her twitches - somewhat sadly, Drakken thinks. "Understood. Look, my childhood pretty much bit, too."

Drakken chokes on the statement. He's heard only scraps of it before, disconnected portions that lessened his bafflement with each one offered to him. He hates the idea of her pain, perhaps even more than the memory of his own. "If only -" he starts to say.

Shego chops his words off with her scissor-like hands. "You got a time machine, Dr. D?"

"Ummmm. . . .no." This seems a rather random question. "And even if I did, crossing your own timeline can be very dangerous. You see, the space-time continuum is rather fragile as is, and while not every paradox will endanger it, you can never be too sure - "

"Is that nerd-speak for 'I realize I can't change the past'?" Shego interrupts again.

"Ohhhh." _Now_ Drakken understands. "Well, yes, I suppose so." He does another safari scan of the room, eager for a change in subject, and lands on the baby bump again. "So. . . do you know if it's a boy or a girl yet? Because I'm pretty sure the doctors can tell by now -"

"Yep, the doctors can tell," Shego says. "But we decided we wanted it to be a surprise."

"Oh, surprises are great!" Drakken says. "Unless you have to _wait_ for them." He folds his arms and attempts to pout. It doesn't work, even with his natural talent for it. His mind can only focus on the miracle of new life inside his old - well, not _old_ , but longtime - friend.

Shego's cat-eyes widen all of a sudden. "Well, whatever it is, it's in an active mood today. Been kickin' up a storm all day." She glances slyly at Drakken. "Wanna feel it?"

For a fleeting moment, Drakken thinks she is asking him if he wants to swap bodies, which is rather brash - and rather impossible, considering his brain-switching machine was destroyed almost a decade ago in the lair he left to self-destruct. He quickly realizes, however - _Hey! I've seen this on TV!_

He hesitates, cheeks slowly filling with pink. He's never, ever touched a woman's stomach in his life before. . . but to feel the baby astir inside Shego might be worth a little awkwardness.

"Is it all right?" Drakken asks, his fingers spread, cautious.

Shego quirks an eyebrow as if to say, _Drak-ken - get with the program, please?_ "Um, I offered to you. Generally, that means it's all right."

"Oh, ha-ha-ha-ha." Drakken reaches forward, nerves fluttering, and touches the bulge. At first, he feels nothing, save for the wobbly surface reminiscent of a water bed.

And then it happens. Something miniscule shifts and knocks against his hand. Deliberately.

Drakken jumps backward and impresses himself by landing in the position befitting a biped. "It's real! It bumped me!" he cries. His heart takes the elevator up to his top floor. . . or something.

It was a tiny, barely discernible little kick, the type that a doctor can coax out with his rubber hammer tool without you even knowing it. And yet it's all he needs to know this kid will as strong and feisty as its parents. Especially its mother.

"Alert the press!" The sparkle in Shego's eyes is almost too big for them. "Unborn baby kicks uncle-to-be!" She pats the bump. "Yeah, I know, kid. I know."

Drakken feels his ponytail perk up, the way Commodore Puddles' tail does when you dangle his favorite rope toy before him. "Can it hear us by now?"

"Yeah."

Drakken leans forward, as close as he can approach without getting creepy, and works his lips near what is colloquially Shego's stomach, poetically her womb, and scientifically her uterus. "Respect your elders! Science is cool! Don't do drugs!" he hollers.

Shego snorts, which only someone as awesome as she is can do while still sounding ladylike. "Hear, yeah. Understand, maaaaybe not."

Well, yes, that does make sense. It is a much longer, more complicated process for the brain to gather words and craft rudimentary definitions-by-context for them than to simply hear them. He's not the one with the child development degree, but Drakken suspects this process only begins _after_ birth.

Still, he can't resist adding, "One last thing! Your Uncle Drakken is amazing!"

"And humble," Shego says dryly. It's teasing, not gentle because that's not Shego's way, but not harsh and stabbing either.

Drakken tickles the tips of his earlobes with his smile. Even Shego laughs - a rich sound he's still getting used to.

He's felt the future nudge his hand.

Mother darts over to them as fast as her legs, short like Drakken's, can carry her. "Oooh, what's all the excitement about?"

Drakken hears Shego's only-halfway-restrained snort - it _is_ an ironic question coming from Mother - but he's too filled with his own exuberance to much care. "The baby kicked!" he says, the announcement resonating off the narrow walls that lean inward like italicized type.

Mother squeals so loud and so high, Drakken throws a nervous glance back at the window pane to make sure it stays intact. "Ohhh, my own little grandbaby!" She claps again - and again and again, until she resembles a child's toy herself, happy tears sparkling in her eyes. "Let me feel!"

Drakken obediently retreats so his mother can squeeze in. One heel snags on the back of his forgotten baby book, and he basically capsizes to the ground. Shego giggles above him - not the rich laugh, but a juicy little squeak that sounds as if it should be coming from someone of Mother's tiny stature and doting character.

Though his veins don't burn - that is now reserved for much greater offenses - Drakken groans a little, just inside himself. Of _course_ he tripped. Of _course_ he fell. Of _course_ she's giggling. Why doesn't it ever happen to -

He stops, neurons freezing halfway down their electrical paths. What is he saying? What kind of boar is he? Shego is _pregnant_ , for pity's sake! Of _course_ he doesn't want her to slip and fall.

Just glad that no one's looking into his eyes - they always serve as little peepholes into his thoughts, according to Shego - Drakken stands up and dusts the seat of his pants. He tries to imagine, not just with his mind but down the whole length of his body, what it must be like to be pregnant, to be bulky with the growth of another person. He's never hauled anything around in him heavier than a cupcake bloat, and that was only overnight. . .

It doesn't take long for Drakken's imagination to short-circuit, as it always does when it runs up against images of discomfort. How do women _stand_ it, especially ones as little as his mother? He would be crying nonstop.

That's why Drakken comes over to stand between his two favorite ladies again, the puffy pink mass of Mother's hair rising only to about his belt. He folds down and voluntarily hugs his mother. She immediately pinches his cheek - a result as inevitable as vinegar fizzing on limestone. And when she hugs back, it's as though she's trying to squeeze the peach cobbler she insisted on feeding them upon their arrival back out of him.

Currently Shego's backing away from Mother, and Drakken doesn't blame her. One of Mother's embraces, and she might just go into labor after all, and the baby still has two months to go. (Babies who are born two months early tend to have problems. Drakken's read up on it.)

Drakken wriggles a little in his mother's grasp, as much as he can without (well, hopefully without) _looking_ like he's dying to get away. "You'll make a great grandmother," he says when he has his facial muscles at his full disposal again.

Wait. No. Something about those words came out differently than he'd anticipated. "I mean, a _wonderful_ grandmother," Drakken amends himself. "You aren't going to be a great-grandmother until _this_ baby starts having babies, and - ooh boy!" He holds up his hands to ward off the onslaught of too much future. "Let's not get hasty!"

Mother tucks his fingers into hers, and his seem massive in comparison. "I know exactly what you meant, Drewbie," she says.

Shego bends like she's talking directly to the baby - although the extent of Shego's bend these days is hardly more than a dip of her chin. "You catchin' all this, kiddo? Your Uncle Drakken's gonna be a trip."

Drakken doesn't bother to ask where to. He gazes around the room with his throat lumping up. And it's not from dust. There's not that much up here anyway, as he's already noted.

There _are_ memories. Good ones, bad ones, of a childhood tarnished by his dad's departure and his lack of friends. Of a life that probably never would have amounted to anything if not for the lingering presence of his mother's love.

It's moving enough that he doesn't squirm too much when she closes in for the next cheek-pinch.

Still, he'll admit he doesn't mind when she cuts herself off with a cry of, "Ohhh, Drewbie, your little stacking rings! You _loved_ these when you were a baby!"

Drakken can see why. The different colored rings piled on top of each other, a stackable rainbow, with surfaces perfect for new little gums to gnaw on. Strangely enough, something else about it flits in the back corner of his mind - not a memory, just a tickle, like a feather brushing the bottom of your feet. Maybe something from a dream, although it's sandwiched in deeper layers - maybe a dream of a dream or an alternate timeline that never wound up happening.

Even odder, _invention_ \- the idea if not the word - lurks below the mental picture of the thing. But it can't be, Drakken knows. He remembers everything he's ever invented from fourth grade on.

(That rubber-controlling ray was a work of true genius, and he got double detention for it. The injustice of the world!)

And then the thought's gone, like it's no more substantial than whatever's dancing in the sunbeams. It's amazing how pretty allergens can look.

Shego winds up selecting the stacking rings, along with several other toys; a pile of onesies, kept in near-mint condition by a scientific ritual known only to mothers; and an old baby bottle, which she whispers to Drakken she'll either use or sell to the Middleton Museum of History. He's _fairly_ certain she's kidding - but one can rarely tell with Shego.

They're packing those up in a big plastic carton when Mother stumbles - not literally, not the way he did - across the baby book again. Drakken can tell by the look on her soft face that it's still open to the page depicting Whoa Rocky and Richard Lipsky holding baby Drew on the back of his new horse. Her sigh isn't miserable, just nostalgic at the edges.

Drakken crosses over to her, without stubbing a single toe in the process, and places a hand on her shoulder. When Mother glances up at him, he smiles, a real smile. The wobbly one she gives him in return is the same beautiful one that always soothed Drakken's nerves when he was a kid.

It's one thing he doesn't mind being reminded of.

Drakken zips back to the box and gallantly hefts it into his arms before anyone else can reach it or Shego can protest. It's not weighty enough to hitch his back - well, not too badly, at least. And he _is_ the biggest person here (for a change), and he _will_ carry this thing down the stairs so that Shego can make her independent way down after him!

The comfortably musty scent in his nostrils prompts Drakken to take one last long look around the attic, at the childhood board games he simply _must_ bring back out of storage sometime because they're so much darn fun! At the empty chemistry-set containers he insisted on keeping long after he ran out of supplies. At the stuffed animals, watching him with empty button eyes that remember the same things he does.

One pair in particular.

Something tugs, thinly, at his chest. It's over now. He'll never lug Mr. Cuddlelumps around by the neck again.

He'll never throw him away, either.


	16. Here We Go Again

**~Drakken-DNAmy friend stuff. Do I ship it? Not really, but I couldn't leave it where it was on _Sick Day_ either. **

**Occasional grammar errors to capture Drakken's inconsistent "voice."**

 **Hope you enjoy.~**

He's got to get out of here.

HenchCo's big, well-lit interior is uncharacteristically still and stifling, worse even than it was the times Dr. Drakken was sick here. The appetizers aren't appetizing, not with that statue that was once a fellow supervillain in the corner. Monkey Fist's lips are parted, as though in mid-beg. It's hard for Drakken not to expect them to launch right into some sly little insults about how overly reliant on technology he is. And while he's not going to miss that, not the slightest bit, the floor's still wobbly under Drakken.

Even in his just-the-right-shade-of-menacing-blue lab coat and coordinating black, booby-trapped belt, even with his disconcerting skin and tortured-looking scar, he's having a tough time feeling like Deadly Drakken. That's not really the problem, though, what with everyone else in the same state.

For the first time in decades, attending a supervillain gathering doesn't feel like appearing before an esteemed panel of judges. Everyone's the same here, stumbling around in their - if not grief, at least shock. They're quiet and respectful - two things supervillains are not known for being. If it weren't for their moving about, mingling uneasily around the room, they could have all been stone statues themselves.

Duff Killigan paces in a rough ellipsis across the red carpet, like one of those sentries in a video game who are a cinch to sneak past once you memorize their limited guarding zone. Senor Senior, Junior is bug-eyed, while his father circles the room, squeezing shoulders and murmuring words of reassurance and generally being perfect because he's Senior. Even Eddy's voice is hushed, and Camille Leon isn't showing off her animal-skin purse. Ordinarily, Drakken wouldn't care about it one way or another, but today, it's another dead thing in the room, and it's giving him creepy-crawlies all up his throat.

The one person who seems unaffected is Jack Hench himself. Of course. Monkey Fist never bought things from him.

Even Professor Dementor, the callous little shrimp, appears nonplussed (that's a great word, _nonplussed_ ). When he nears the statue, he takes off his helmet-mask and holds it momentarily over his heart, ducking his head.

And even the novelty of Dementor's dark brown hair, plastered to his scalp - Drakken's never seen it before - can't keep him there any longer. He's also never been up close and personal with death, and though this isn't death _per se_ (a fancy way of saying "exactly"). . . he still needs some air.

Drakken slips out HenchCo's back door, after some fumbling with the knob. Closes the door behind him. Leans back against it and permits his entire framework to shake.

 _Okay, now deep breaths. In, out, in, out, in, out._

Drakken does. Well, at least he tries his darnedest.

And that's when he hears the crying.

It's audibly clogged, as if someone is trying _their_ darnedest to subdue the sobs, but the things overpower them and come ripping out anyway. It's a sound Drakken recognizes all too well.

Curiosity gets the better of Drakken, and he steps on stiffening toes in the direction of the noise. It's coming from the wide steps preceding HenchCo's side entrance - what would be called an alley by anyone less classy than Hench, who doesn't want to conjure up expectations of wild rodents and muggers. With his spine at a completely straight angle, Drakken can spot the crier.

DNAmy.

She's _crying_. Happy, bouncing DNAmy is sitting here on the stone steps, so tiny and soft against their vast hardness, sobbing like her fluctuating heart is about to break. Not as bad as she was on the phone, but here he can see her. Her shoulders shake, her hands vibrate as they're plastered over her face.

Well, once the initial shock wears off, it's rather unsurprising. She was in love with Monkey Fist, so it's only natural that she's sobbing now.

For an instant, white-hot satisfaction blasts Drakken. For an instant, he's villainous and he's vengeful. He cried at least that hard when she rejected him. For the very man she was now shedding tears over. Justice is meted out in strange ways, after all.

The thought doesn't sit easily on his already-knotted stomach. His father's side hates her, but his mother's side feels sorry for her. And - ugh - there's no contest as to which parent is more admirable.

Dr. Drakken may be a jerk in a lot of ways, but he can't stand to see a woman cry.

He sighs in exasperation - the most villainous emotion he can summon right now - and heads toward the steps. _I'll just ask_ , Drakken tells himself. _I'll just make sure she's okay, and then I'll leave._

It takes a moment to free his lips from their grimace, but finally they manage to move. "Hello, Amy," he says as stiffly as he can with his voice threatening to break like a fourteen-year-old's.

The last time he spoke, truly spoke, with her, he left nursing wounds that didn't heal for. . . for. . . well, nothing on him ever seems to heal. Only scar. (Drakken congratulates himself for drawing such clear outside/inside parallels.)

DNAmy glances up at him, and from the look on her face you'd think she was seeing a Sith Lord. Drakken begins to bristle and then remembers that he's still bruised and battered, blacker and bluer than usual from his (literal) run-in with that stupid train tunnel. "Dr. Drakken?" she asks, as if in disbelief.

"Yep, that's me!" Drakken laughs, a laugh far too loud, far too reminiscent of a braying donkey - _hee-haw, hee-haw._

DNAmy swipes the tears with the back of her hand. Drakken clamps his mouth shut to terminate the _hee-haw_ program. He knows that right now, he must be sensitive, but that's not something he gets much chance to practice in his line of work. He could name every single lobe of her brain that's overloading and making her cry, but what good would that do?

Drakken plops down beside her and twiddles perspiration-damp fingers in his lap. Maybe he doesn't want to understand DNAmy's pain. His own is already writhing in his throat.

DNAmy doesn't seem to have the strength to speak. That's almost scarier than the statue. Drakken considers going back inside, and then he's assailed by the image of Monkey Fist forever suspended, empty eyes even colder and grayer in stone than they were in life, printed across his mental vision - and, no, that's an exaggeration of how uncomfortable he is. He'll stay.

"So. . ." Drakken begins. "How's things. . . besides your boyfriend turning to stone, I mean?"

Why is it that the more vital it is for him not to say anything dumb, the greater the odds are that he'll wind up making a complete imbecile of himself?

That causes DNAmy to sob even harder. Drakken feels like a moon newly pulled into orbit, smashing into all the other moons and knocking them off their trajectories.

"You know what?" he says. "That was stupid. I'll just goooo. . ."

Cheeks already three different stages of pink, he rises to his feet and is planning a crab-step away. And then DNAmy snags his arm.

Drakken freezes.

Her fingers are as soft as ever, pudgy and tender. And warm - oh so very warm, just as he remembers them. It's. . . well, it's the most pleasant sensation he's felt all day. Not that it has a whole lot of competition.

And he may be a moon yanked into orbit after all, because he sits right back down.

He feels as if he's dialed a very, very wrong number and gotten an operator who only speaks Belgian. That's one language more than his tongue can find right now, anyway.

Drakken makes another attempt: "This is awful for you, isn't it?" He can almost hear Shego berating him for such an utterly obvious statement. At least it's _somewhat_ sensitive.

"It is," DNAmy says. Her whimper whistles a little, probably due to that gap between her front teeth. Ever since DNAmy turned him down, he's tried to believe she's ugly, like all the gossip rags at Smarty Mart say about her. It's not working right now. She just looks too sweet, too innocent. Too much like his mother.

"I can't even imagine." Drakken's pulse palpitates in every bruise from his forehead down. "It's sad for _me_ , and I wasn't in love with him! I didn't even really like him very much."

Gnngh - his tongue is such a disobedient little beast!

Drakken gazes back at DNAmy and then darts it away, toward the sky, the parking lot, anything other than her. "No offense or anything," he adds quickly, because to speak ill of the dead is the ultimate in talking about someone behind their back. "He just wasn't my type. . ."

"None taken," DNAmy whispers. Her words are still clumped together like cold oatmeal. She plasters a hand to her mouth, hiding the gap. Drakken's strangely disappointed. "I just . . . none of us ever got to say good-bye."

Drakken's own vocabulary crumbles to powder. _Say good-bye_? Though he had no affection for Monkey Fist, if he knew the man were going to. . . err. . . depart anytime soon, would he have shaken his weird simian hand and wished him good luck in whatever the afterlife held, maybe admitted that Monkey Fist was a top-level fighter, even if he _couldn't_ construct a Doomsday device if it were handed to him complete with instructions?

Drakken liked to think so.

"It's so unexpected," Drakken says, to drown out the silence between them that keeps, irrationally, growing louder. "Who expects someone to turn to stone? Especially when they're young and healthy and. . . did he consume a lot of salt?" He's pretty sure he read a sci-fi novel once where that turned a man into a living pillar of minerals.

Or was that a Bible story?

His thoughts are unraveling like bad wool caught on a hook. When DNAmy shakes her head and actually sniffles - it's quite pitiful - they pill themselves up uselessly.

Drakken extends his legs to maximum length and runs his tongue all around his teeth. No, there will be no relaxing. His blood is so prickly and stressed, he might as well have razor blades for platelets. Only without pain. Just the endless crawling of cells. "How old is - _was_ \- he?" he asks.

It's strange to make that sudden shift to - what were they called in English class? - past-tense verbs. So strange it almost hurts.

DNAmy's already tiny dark eyes are puffing in on themselves. The sight of it nearly leaves him pulseless. "Forty-four," she says.

The number clobbers Drakken like a fist. Only two years older than Drakken himself. Which isn't exactly a spring peeper or whatever the term is, but it's still too young to be dead. People aren't supposed to die until they have white hair and arthritis and odd holes in their memories, not when they're still spry enough to leap around, kicking Kim Possible and performing kung-fu moves that - quite literally - scare the pants off her friend, her boyfriend now. . .

An awful thought permeates Drakken's brain like the stink of curdled milk. "What about his family? Did Kim Possible have to tell them, too?" he says.

DNAmy glances up at him, surprise flitting across her face. "Oh, Doctor, there _is_ no family. Monty's parents and siblings are all long gone. He had the Fiske estate and fortune for a reason."

Her use of "Doctor," her least-embarrassing pet name for him, carries him back to a blissful time and then cruelly drops him back into the present. Drakken can no longer feel the steps he's sitting on, though moments ago they were digging into his too-bony-from-prison backside. Awful old Monkey Fist - without a family.

Fiske. Drakken forgot that was his last name.

It's a good thing, then, that she weeps for him, Drakken decides. There's still a lot he doesn't know about what a life is and what it means to take it, but he figures everyone should have somebody to cry for them when they die.

Even if they don't deserve it.

Drakken's hands twist in his lap. "So - now the whole family's gone?"

It's evidently the wrong thing to say, because it brings on another bawling fit.

Great. _Now_ what is he supposed to do? He has no experience in lessening others' distress. He's spent the last two-decades-and-counting devoted to _causing_ his enemies distress, and he's barely made a dent in that, either!

Sometimes it seems as if he's useless at anything he desperately needs to do.

Amy's crying so hard and shaking so bad, she looks smaller and plumper and more little-girlish than ever. She's always been tiny, but Drakken doesn't remember ever seeing that fragile aura surrounding her like those halos around the moon right before it snows.

He wrings his hands behind his back, suddenly feeling much taller than his five-foot-nine-(and-a-half)-inch height. Just the sensation he's been waiting for since he was about sixteen, only now he can't even enjoy it. He always feels big next to her, but not in that ego-expanding way - just too tall and too long with gangly angles sticking out everywhere. It's closer to being a giraffe in a movie theater than being a dashing hero on the big screen.

Drakken stretches and crosses his legs at the ankle to match hers. "I'm sorry," he breathes, and for the first time in a very long while, he feels like he's done the right thing.

Amy fiddles with the winged stuffed creature hanging around her neck - the marvelously twisted one that still manages to look sweet. "You probably won't believe me," she hiccups, "but there was good in him once."

She's correct about one thing - Drakken's first instinct is to disbelieve her. He's never once heard Monkey Fist say a kind word about anyone or anything, save for a few monkey shrines he liked, and now he never shall. The man had no family to have a soft spot for, and with no discernible goal, you couldn't even make the case that he started off meaning well, as Drakken had so many years ago.

But that's DNAmy for you. Dumb ol' DNAmy, always seeing the very best in people, even if it's subatomic.

Which, actually, is why he loved her. Why he wanted her to love him back.

Okay - _this_. This hurts.

Amy sobs like a little girl, nose-goop and all, squeaks tearing free from her throat. It makes him want to protect her, only he can't. _He_ 's back to being the little boy nobody wants on their kickball team.

"What kind of good?" Drakken says.

"Well, you didn't see him when he asked me to perform radical genetic surgery on his hands and feet." DNAmy's lips take a fleeting, shaky upward turn. "He was so sweet and kind back then. Thoroughly charming, in fact. He knew how to treat a lady."

Drakken _feels_ his insides buck like they've been poked with a live power line. He's never thought of Monkey Fist as a charmer. But now, looking (and listening) back to his upper-crust British accent and his square chin and the strong appendages he must have had before he traded them out for hairy knuckles and opposable toes. . .

"Anything else?" Drakken says, quite loudly, just to stop that train of thought right in its tracks (or perhaps _on_ its tracks; they are talking about trains, after all).

"Oh, yes. He was a very caring pet owner. I love that in a man. Now I know he'd have had a fit if he knew I'd referred to the monkey ninjas as 'pets,' the silly dear," Amy adds before Drakken can reference his own, very-well-cared-for poodle, "but he was good with them. And they loved him so much." Her eyes mist over again. "Poor little things. I wonder where they even are right now."

Amy's voice snags to a stop right there, and so do Drakken's thoughts. The monkey ninjas may have been well-trained little warriors - seriously scary at times - but first and foremost, they were animals devoted to serving their master. Knowing nothing of said master's evil intent, their only ethics a sense of loyalty to the one who fed them bananas and showed them how to defend themselves. It's one the lovely things about animals that makes up for when they have accidents in the house.

They sit there somberly for a moment. Drakken won't go home and soak his pillow with tears for the guy, but it's a major bummer. He's glad it wasn't him.

"So when Kim Possible and her boyfriend came to my house to tell me the news. . ." DNAmy doesn't finish that one, either.

She doesn't have to. Drakken's heard. She gave them milk and cookies. He has the somewhat numb mental image of DNAmy, bustling around in her happy little white house, pulling a fresh batch of gingersnaps from the oven. She looks cute in an apron. . .

Amy sniffles and murmurs through her fingers, "I just can't believe he's gone."

She's already said something to that effect more than once. It is not, however, an opportune time to point this out. Drakken simply says, "How - how exactly did it happen?"

He hasn't been able to get the full story out of anyone yet, and he's brimming over with curiosity.

DNAmy lowers her lashes until they brush the freckles on her cherub cheeks. It appears as though she's seeking something deep inside herself, maybe with the surgical instruments she used on Monkey Fist, extracting what would rather stay in place. "He got all preoccupied with getting his hands on this superweapon," she says. "Some prophecy said that whoever mastered its power would become unstoppable."

Drakken nods her on. This is the one Monkey-Fist-related detail that he can relate to, though knowing Monkey Fist, the thing was probably a relic with no fun frills, powered by monkey mojo or whatever he attributed his skills to. And, _sheesh_ , just because something was written four thousand years ago in fancy calligraphy doesn't mean it's legit!

Part of Drakken wonders if Kim Possible and Whatever His Name Is came to DNAmy because she'd been the closest to Monkey Fist, or if they'd simply chosen the villain least likely to react to the news by slapping them in a death trap. While he'll admit that he hasn't plumbed DNAmy's depths, the way he once thought he had, Drakken can say with very little hesitation that she's never tried to kill anyone. He can't even picture her swatting a fly.

Not like Monkey Fist. And not at all like Drakken.

Looking at her little pixie face, Drakken feels as old and thin and worn-out as a piece of paper from back when it was called "parchment." Fraying at the edges and bloodshot in the whites of his eyes, he looks way worse than her, and he isn't the one who's been bawling his guts out.

"And from what Kim Possible's boyfriend told me," Amy says, "he thought the only way to get his hands on the weapon was to make a deal with a mystical dark force named the Yono."

"Oooh." Drakken cringes. "That's never a good idea. Well - I wouldn't know - I've never done it - but it always gets you killed in Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books. Never do anything in real life that gets you killed in Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books. That's my motto! . . . Well, actually, I just came up with it, but. . . it'd make a good motto, wouldn't it?"

Drakken's words keep unraveling, like that hair stuck in your mouth, the one whose elusive end you're trying so hard to locate so you can pull the thing out. A sickly rumble in his gut finally snaps them off completely.

That's good. He wasn't getting out _that_ hole anytime soon.

DNAmy slides the creature on its makeshift necklace again. "Monty had to agree to become the next Yono. If he won, he would become a being of unimaginable power."

". . . He didn't win," Drakken says. Though that serves as a testament to deductive skills he feared he'd lost forever, his numb, hollow chest doesn't poke out.

Amy just shakes her head. Her tears have no sound now, a feat Drakken could never manage. They just drip off her face like bothersome little blobs of candle wax onto a birthday cake.

He wishes, suddenly, that he could make her giggle.

Not badly enough to get up and do a pratfall for her benefit. But - still. Maybe he could tell her a knock-knock joke or something. . .

Drakken's scrambling through his mental comedy file - which the crisis seems to have deleted - when Amy says, "The really sad thing is, I think he was gone for a long time already. I just didn't see it before."

Stare. Blink. An attempt to bring her words into focus, because as everyone knows, you can't blink ears. Monkey Fist _has_ been wrapped up in. . . whatever Monkey Fist does - did - recently, but geographically, he's been no farther away from DNAmy than he's ever been.

"How?" Drakken nips back _the heck_ before it inserts itself.

DNAmy makes an entirely new, uncatalogued noise and squeezes at nothing until the dimples on her knuckles turn white. "He'd been so _mean_ lately."

In some distant corner of his psyche, Drakken's glad that "mean" is the meanest word she knows.

Drakken laughs, in some high, nervous key that rapidly escapes his control. "He's _always_ been mean, Amy. Not in a bad way! We're supervillains, after all! We _pride_ ourselves on our meanness!"

Everything he says is perfectly logical, and yet Drakken knows he's making no sense. Whatever else he has stored up inside him, it'll only seem. . . well, _mean_ in the face of DNAmy's care for Monkey Fist. He never knew _he_ cared about Monkey Fist. But it's not every day someone you know turns to stone, and it wrenches your life sideways so that you can't carry on as normal. The only thing to do is punch his own mute button and wait for DNAmy to speak again.

She does, breathing raggedly - or is that him? "He became so obsessed with that superweapon that he would do anything to find it. He tried to kill" - the _kill_ is whispered, as if it would damage her vocal chords to say it aloud - "a baby."

Drakken's jaw drops. "A baby?"

He's stunned. Okay, so his own reputation is not exactly clean, either - more like the splotchy color you get when you wash reds with whites. Many are the death traps he's designed for Kim Possible. Still, that was only because she was getting in the way of his plans! What threat could a baby pose to even a non-genius like Monkey Fist?

Amy nods, her misery as visible as the water stains on her glasses. Part of him wants to slip his arm around her shoulders. Another part freezes in horror, sticks out its tongue, and almost retches at the thought.

Not because she's disgusting, even with a runny nose. She's just. . . scary. Forbidden. Does weird, unscientific things to his thought process.

Then Amy says it: "It was the boyfriend's little sister."

All of Drakken's bodily systems shut briefly down, and when they fire up again, he's standing there, hearing seven different types of ringing and not knowing which comes from outside and which from within. "Hana?" he chokes out.

Hana of the dense fuzz of black hair and the matching eyes and the giggle like rainfall? Hana, who looks at him without fear, or hatred, or the desire to see him humiliated (whatever that's called), because she doesn't know about those things yet? Hana, who calls him "Bloo"?

He doesn't mean for his heart to fracture, but it does.

A shrug from DNAmy. "I think that's what they said her name was."

Even though the weather is pleasant and more-than-adequately-warm for the first week of June, Drakken shivers. "Even I would never do that," he says. And he wouldn't.

No, he'd just lay waste to the world. With kiddy toys. He might have killed a baby, for all he knows. Maybe dozens of them.

How does that make him any worthier than Monkey Fist to stand anywhere near her?

He should reach out, pat her or something, but he can only stare at his own tiny, lethal fingers. Can these hands give life or only take it? Some part of Drakken longs for her innocence.

Now he's beginning to think he should have carefully weighed that statement and marked it with the proper postage before just letting it fly. . .

DNAmy cuts his thoughts off by nodding. _Nodding_. "I know you wouldn't," she says. "Maybe I should have -"

She doesn't finish.

His cheeks burn at 200 degrees. Celsius.

Questions swarm in Drakken's brain like that hive of bees he forgot to smoke before that one scheme. (If not for the beekeeper suit, he might've needed to be airlifted to the nearest hospital; as it was, he made a perfect fool of himself in front of Kim Possible once again.) _Should have what? Should have what?_

It'd be the perfect opportunity to spit in her face. And Drakken would do it, except -

Except she just believed him. Quick as a wink, as if nothing to the contrary had ever crossed her mind.

And despite her bad taste in men, it's hard seeing DNAmy when she's not wearing a big, happy smile. She's cute. Not traditionally, but then, neither is he. The tabloids say she's fat, and she is, kind of, but not in a bad way. He's always preferred women a little rounder, a little cuddlier. Not that he dwells on such topics often, though every now and then Drakken will worry over how stick-skinny all the women either are or want be nowadays.

Shego's sort of more muscular. He hasn't decided yet if he likes that or not. It at least gives her some meat on her bones, but you can't cuddle muscle.

 _Hydrogen is the lightest element. Helium is a noble gas and does not interact with any -_

"I asked for the whole story, and I got it," Amy says. "I know Kim Possible can be sort of a meanie, but the boy isn't. They weren't happy about it, either. They wouldn't have just made it up to upset me."

Ah. So that's it. She's had her sunglasses yanked off while her eyes are still dilated, and everything is too true, too bright, and too clear.

Drakken resumes staring and blinking. The muscles in his throat churn, rendering speech impossible.

Finally, DNAmy shakes back her choppy haircut - there's a name for that type of cut, but it's in even deeper storage than the buffoon's. "Look at me," she says with a bitter half-laugh, another sound Drakken's never heard out of her until now. "Look at me. I've been crying all day, and my mascara's running -" she gestures to the black streaks that Drakken recognizes from his mother - "and I don't even have anything to blow my nose on."

With no one else around, it falls on Drakken to tend to her. If he were a perfect gentleman like Senior, he'd be ready with a monogrammed hankie. But he's just Drakken, and all he can do is offer her his sleeve. He takes the fabric between his thumb and index finger and sheepishly lifts it from where it falls limply over his forearm.

DNAmy cries and laughs and waves him off all at once. "No," she says. "But thank you."

Her shimmering eyes watch him with all the warmth of her homemade cookies, and Drakken remembers another reason why he was so convinced they needed to spend the rest of their lives together. (Well, _two_ other reasons if you count the cookies.) Sometimes even the most securest evil genius needs to know they're not "just" Drakken. That they're special.

The pain drives at Drakken like a stake through the heart. Which, come to think of it, would not be the most reliable method of identifying vampires, because doesn't _every_ one die from that? Unless he's missing something, which has been known to happen a time or two. . .

Yep. He should leave now. For more than one reason.

He's scooted closer to her, his own spirit stinging, and that just can't happen.

Drakken glances queasily back at the door. It's hard not to worry that more successful villains will come pouring out of there, see the two of them huddled down being emotional together, and start sniggering to beat all. Still, he gets the feeling not even Professor Dementor could find too much humor in anything about this tragedy.

Then his gaze drifts back to DNAmy, still so small and alone and _doggone it_ , why did Mother have to raise him to be such a gentleman?

Drakken leaps to his feet, hops a few times in place to revive the nerve endings in them, and says, "Will you be able to get home okay? Do you have a hovercraft or. . . what are those things that are like hovercrafts but on the ground?"

"A car?" Drakken hears laughter in Amy's voice again, and it's not bitter this go-round.

Drakken snaps his fingers. "Yes, that! Because - if you don't -"

 _Shego and I could take you in my hovercraft. Because I know all three of us fit._

Amy nods at him again. "Yes. I have a ride," she says.

Thank goodness. Shego has no patience for blubbering and no contractual obligation to _not_ push DNAmy out of the hovercraft between HenchCo and the little picket-fence house.

All right, and he's selfish enough to be relieved that he doesn't have to stick around her any longer! So what? He's a supervillain. They _pride_ themselves on their selfishness.

 _Or_ are _you, Drakken?_ The Hard Thing in his brain, the one that wants him to be hard, too, fires whispers at him like weaponry. _You've forgotten every evil plan you've come up with in the past five days. You're worthless without your note cards. You can't even bring yourself to design a proper death trap anymore! What kind of pathetic excuse for villainy is that?_

Drakken shifts from foot to foot. Looking down at DNAmy, for about ten seconds he considers sharing it with her - that he thrashes around in bed when he should be asleep, that he forgets to eat, that he's stretched as thin as an aneurism and he can't figure out how to reset to the last version of himself that still had a bounce in his step.

Then he regathers his senses and wags a finger at himself. (Mentally, because fingers don't bend that way very well.) DNAmy is nothing more than a silly, fickle woman who can't be trusted with the innermost secrets of his heart or whatever the proper flowery term is. He learned that the hard way. The _really_ hard way - as in, so hard it makes the Hard Thing seem pliable.

"So!" Drakken speaks a little too loudly - it's the best method of avoiding the accusations pelleting off the walls of his head. "Are you going to be okay, going home alone?"

 _Eek! Ack! What was that?_

Drakken couldn't tell you, not for a fortune. All he knows is that he wouldn't be able to make the return trip to his own lair without Shego's pointed chin in the seat beside him.

(Especially not if she were piloting, because then they'd plummet out of the sky, but that's beside the point.)

"Oh, I won't be alone," Amy says. A few faint embers of DNAmy-life stir in her eyes. "I'll be taking Monty with me."

He must have _some_ impulse control, Drakken decides later, because he doesn't automatically burst out with, "But he's dead! Or stone or whatever!" Monkey Fist _is_ stone, Drakken realizes one small piece at a time, a statue that can be picked up and moved around, albeit at great risk of straining your back. Makes his hurt just thinking about it.

Not to mention - _ewwww_. Who would want to haul a dead guy around?

Drakken halts in mid-recoil and ponders that. Well. You hear of people carrying around a loved one's ashes. Is a statue really that much creepier?

Yes. It is. (Ashes at least don't _look_ like a person anymore, so you can pretend it's. . . just ashes.) But there's something more raw and mature about this Amy, and he can't expect her to lose all her creepiness overnight.

(It'd be nice, though.)

"Well, I guess I'll see you later, then." The words shake in Drakken's throat. "Hopefully for a happier occasion." _Not much of chance it could be sadder_ , he adds just for himself.

Amy nods. Then slowly, shakily, as if it is her first time doing it ever, she smiles.

The sweet little gap is still there, and he feels his own lips turning up at the corners. A purely physical reaction, of course, because he's not remembering her chocolate-chunk cookies or her fiendish genetics knowledge or her kindness.

He's not remembering, he's not remembering, he's not, and then - wham! - he is.

And DNAmy's looking right into him, seeing the best, believing it _is_ the best rather than just not-as-bad-as-the-rest-of-him. The rest that's fallen into the same unreliable heap as an armload of dropped note cards.

Drakken works his jaw from side to side and lets his eyebrow go into a hopeful perk.

And then, _it_ happens. Somewhere in the depths of his belly, he feels it.

A flutter.

Drakken also feels the blueness abandoning his face. _Mayday! Mayday!_

He jumps hastily away, lifts one hand into some semblance of a wave, and blurts, "Gotta go see you byeeeeee!" Then he flips around and sprints behind the building as fast as his disproportionate legs will carry him, lungs heaving to keep up with themselves.

Once he's safely hidden, Drakken rests his forehead against HenchCo's pretentious granite and grunts out a "Ngggh!" as soon as he's caught enough of his breath. What is this? What _is_ this? This is _not_ supposed to happen! Not again. Not with his villainous career already in jeopardy.

It would be one thing if DNAmy were flirting and being playful, as she usually is. _That_ Drakken has to learned to steer around, though it still stabs him with that stake-to-the-chest sensation. This wounded Amy, though. . . he has no data on her, no precedent, no _any_ thing!

He needs to go home and do random chemical experiments until things start making sense again

Drakken rears back to meet the wall head-on (literally) and only stops when the pulsating between his temples reminds him of the concussion he was admitted for not even a week ago. Another souvenir of his latest failure to be Deadly Drakken.

 _But at least you're still alive,_ the Mushy Thing tells him. Its whisper fizzles against the Hard Thing's like baking soda and vinegar.

 _Yes - and now what?_ says another Thing too bewildered to be anyone other than the essence of Dr. Drakken.

He does a hundred-eighty-degree turn and stares at the huge glass double doors marking HenchCo's back entrance. Kim Possible's in there somewhere, standing among the supervillains, and for once it's not because one of them's busted. Ordinarily, the prospect of her carting Dementor off would have Drakken licking his chops, and yet it feels as if he's standing on ground that could turn into ash itself in an instant; he doesn't want any more of them to disappear.

Plus, he's never seen Dementor's face look anything less than condescending. Wiping off the smirk made him less recognizable than removing the helmet.

Ditto for Kim Possible. She's holding herself together very well - of _course_ she is, because she's Little Miss Perfect - but you can tell she's fazed. And nothing has ever fazed Kim Possible, except for that one laser-fiery night that was both the best and worst of Drakken's life. She's grim-mouthed instead of snarky, somehow older in the new getup that (thankfully) covers her navel, and the glances she directs at Drakken are unashamedly sad.

Still hasn't quite figured that one out.

Stoppable's there, too, in baggy denims that are probably the nicest pants he owns. At least the belt cinched around their skinny-guy waist signals that he isn't planning to ruin the occasion by dropping them around his ankles.

At least there's that.

Drat that Kim Possible! Even in Drakken's _imagination_ , she won't stay in the death trap he's constructed for her. Every time he clicks and drags her icon into the spikes and the lava, the program crashes and he receives an error message from his stomach. His entire body's turned into one massive, burbling test tube now that would be compelling, from a biochemistry standpoint, if it weren't his and it weren't so scary.

Drakken taps his fingertips together and works on ignoring how sweaty they've become. He thinks of the stone statue that was once a fellow villain and the baby Monkey Fist tried to kill, and he shudders goose bumps over every inch of his flesh. It makes him want to take a break from being Deadly Drakken.

At least for the rest of the day. At least until the bruises heal and he's back to a spot in the Pool of Insanity where his feet can touch bottom.

His mind returns, without warning, to DNAmy, to the fact that he got her smiling again, if only briefly. In spite of his weary sag, Drakken does buff his nails against his lab coat at the idea of being the only one who could break through her grief, though he can't conjure up much satisfying smugness. That flutter was the best feeling he's had in a long time. That's frightening, too.

When did evil stop being fun?

 **~And, of course, the next time he sees her is at the UN. . . for a _much_ happier occasion. Yep, I'm already planning a follow-up chappy after _Graduation_.~ **


	17. Hate at First Sight

**~Because all great rivalries have to start somewhere. Bad backs, too.**

 **Dementor's broken English done on purpose out of loyalty to Season Four (and 'cause it's just plain fun!)~**

"Dr. Drakken?"

At the sound of his new name, those firm syllables and that crisp double- _k_ hitting the air, Dr. Drakken grins until his face hurts. No more of the _Dreeeewww_ that curled your lip for you or the _Lip!sky_ that required you spit. The subsequent bullying was probably as natural a result as crying after you threw up. (Your eyes were already automatically watering, so why not?)

Pulse throbbing in his eardrums, Drakken unhooks his heels from the underside of the soft-brushed chair and de-kinks his legs, clad in the dress slacks he ironed just this morning. You couldn't show up in HenchCo's spotless interior looking anything less than your best. Everything is either leather or suede or some material so exotic Drakken doesn't even know its name.

The lights, too, are pristine-bright, almost dizzyingly so. Drakken brings both fists up to rub at his eyes and is startled when he connects straight with his eyelids, no longer obstructed by lenses. Of course. The contacts. How he forgot them is a mystery - the day he ditched those sissy-boy glasses was a momentous one.

Drakken blinks a few dozen times, trying to readjust to the moist curves resting near his eyeballs, and steps through the door the receptionist has kindly opened for him, into one of HenchCo's fabled halls. Its wide darkness scores definite points for intimidation factor. Drakken likes it, but he's unsure about the homey warmth of the waiting area concealing this coldness, like frigid temperatures camouflaged by a winter sun.

It's with a touch of uneasiness - _not_ fear, Drakken is quick to remind himself - that he enters Hench's office at the end of the corridor. The sight of Hench himself alleviates that some. He's seated behind a desk of gleaming wood that shields everything from his hipbones down. His hair's slicked back with what must be a gallon of hair slicker (whatever it's called), and he wears a big, welcoming smile.

And though he only appears to be about thirty or so, his position is obviously cemented in the villain industry. Maybe this is a place where it's better to be younger, where you aren't relegated to sleeping on the lumpy bunk and scrounging up dates for everyone. . .

Back molars grinding, Drakken settles his own hipbones in the chair across from Hench and shifts back and forth until his spine is comfortable again. His back just hasn't been _quite_ the same ever since that stupid Bebe practically put in traction.

"Dr. Drakken?"

Drakken flips back to attention so fast he almost somersaults out of the chair.

"By all accounts, you qualify for our programs," Jack Hench says. "And your paperwork looks good."

Drakken nods, beaming. At least he didn't have to fill out an address or any of that nonsense. Hench is savvy enough to know that a villain needs to frequently relocate.

"So, congratulations, Dr. Drakken. You're now a licensed supervillain!" Hench leans across his fancy desk, hand extended. Drakken's close to cringing in anticipation of the slap before it occurs to him that Hench is reaching out for a handshake. Which Drakken accepts with gusto (a marvelous word he read in one of HenchCo's pamphlets and vowed to never forget).

"Thank you, sir," Drakken says professionally. Politely. Placidly.

And then he just can't hold his gusto back any longer. "Can I see one of the catalogs now?" he asks.

Hench forks one over obediently - an excellent quality in a servant, Drakken notes for future reference. "Here, kid. Knock yourself out."

Drakken nearly snatches it from Hench's fingers and reads it while bouncing from one heel to the other. Can't be helped. These are the types of superweapons he's been dreaming about since his first middle-school gym class.

Roguish black helicopters. Spinning Tops of Doom. Voice-activated ray guns - for _how_ much?

Drakken feels his eyes bug out the way that old cartoon coyote's do when the roadrunner plants an anvil on his head. "These prices are - are - are -" he stammers.

"Out of your range?" Hench says.

And how he says it, with that simper to it, as though the fault rests one-hundred-percent on Drakken, heats Drakken's core body temperature (which, as a mammal's, should be remaining fairly constant). "Ridiculous!" he says. Hench's pampered office hushes his voice, and Drakken decides he hates that. What he loves is hearing it amplified off the bare walls of his lair, flooding the room. That little wallflower Drew Lipsky is a thing of the past. Layers and layers of shyness and inhibition have been peeled away like debrided skin.

A knot forms in Drakken's stomach as he gazes down at the page, at the dollar bill symbols followed by six or seven figures. How is he supposed to afford these? He's never been employed, unless you count the two-week summer job program at the hardware store, the one Eddy insisted they both sign up for. What does a mad scientist do to earn that kind of money?

"Do you have any idea what our production costs are, Dr. Drakken?" Hench says, without the slightest hitch in his composure. He doesn't look like the same man anymore, the smile crimped into a smirk.

Drakken balls his hands until his knuckles protrude. He's never punched somebody in the nose before, isn't he sure he even knows _how_ , but Hench's oily blandness tightens his inexperienced fists.

He's saved - err, make that _Hench_ is saved, Drakken corrects himself - from certain humiliation by a knock on the door.

"Ah, yes. I was expecting another visitor." Hench crosses the room and swings the door open. "Come in, Professor Dementor."

Drakken twists around, and his gaze runs downward until it lands on a super-short guy shaped like a box.

It's anybody's guess what the rest of the man looks like, dressed as he is in a maroon lab coat that hugs every muscle, his head crowned with what appears to be a metal cage of some type. Everything above his nose is masked, though of course there are eye-holes so he can tell where he's going.

It should be ridiculous. Instead, it's terrifying. What skin Drakken can make out under all that adornment is golden, evenly tan.

And sticking out of his left breast pocket is a check. A check already made out to HenchCo, as if this man is completing a purchase. As if he can buy anything in the catalog he wants.

"SUCCESS" is all but stamped across the short guy's helmeted forehead. Envy and spite wage war in Drakken's chest as he shrinks inside the outfit that drapes his own still-adolescent-lanky framework.

"Professor Dementor, this is Dr. Drakken." Hench indicates Drakken with a sweep of his arm. "He's a fellow mad scientist. Close to your age, at that."

Drakken gets the distinct impression he's just been thrown into a dog-fighting ring where only the victor emerges.

This Dementor fellow comes up to him and sticks out a box-shaped hand. Drakken eyes it suspiciously. He'd rather be relinquishing his cheek to a kiss from Great-Auntie Martha.

Well. . . maybe it's not _quite_ that bad. Yet.

Drakken grudgingly extends one of his own hands and curls it around Dementor's fingers. The grip that he receives in return is so strong that fear skips across Drakken. It squeaks the "Nice to meet you" that he somehow forces out.

"Ohhh, the pleasure is all belong to ME!" The man yells at the end of the sentence, his voice higher than Drakken expected. Shrill - but not whiny. How does he do it?

Drakken pulls his hand back and cradles it against himself.

"How are you being today?" Professor Dementor says. The man's stocky legs are straight, bringing him up to his total five-foot-two.

Five-foot-two should not intimidate five-foot-nine. Err, ten.

Drakken whiplashes himself back up to his full height, as though one of HenchCo's machines has sneaked up on him and given him a violent shock to the backside. (It hasn't, unless those things can turn invisible on top of everything else, and Drakken almost wouldn't be surprised.) "I'll be better when I take over the world," he says.

Professor Dementor tosses him the kind of look a first-grade teacher would use on a student who was trying her patience. "Ohhh, we have big PLANSES, I SEE! Well, I suppose it is only FAIR to warn you I am GOALING FOR THE SAME THING!"

The thought that this man would flunk Senior English doesn't do much for the crash Drakken's insides are spiraling into. The good news is that the knot in his tummy is gone. The bad news is it's because stomach acid is roaring in from all sides and dissolving it. "Yes, well!" Drakken snaps. "Let me be the first to offer you my condolences for your failure."

(He almost said, "for your loss," but that sounds like someone has died - and as far as he knows, no one has.)

Apparently, it's not as menacing as Drakken intended, because Dementor just flashes gleamy teeth so straight it's well nigh impossible to tell where one ends and the next begins. Drakken squirms again. His own teeth are as white and spotless as a new bathtub, but they're too big and distinct and underbitten to all blend together like that.

Drakken snags his foot in mid-stomp before the kindergartener in him can slam it into the plush carpet.

"Nice STAIN you have GOT THERE!" Dementor tugs at the loose white shirttail Drakken remembers tucking in so carefully hours ago. "Where did you GO ACQUIRING IT?"

Blink. His memory files find no matches, so Drakken decides to _lie_ \- an act permitted, even encouraged, among supervillains. Should be easy.

"Oh, _that_!" Drakken puffs his lips out and flops his wrist to one side. "That's just some runoff from the acid-base coexistence experiment I performed this morning. After splitting the atom."

Dementor laughs as if he has a mouthful of spinach he wants out. "Liar," he says. "That is the JUICE OF GRAPES!"

Is it? Drakken bends down and sniffs the stain.

It is.

Dementor reaches over and neatly relieves Drakken of the catalog clenched in his other hand. "Zese things are VUNDERBAR! Which one is your most favorite?"

His eyes don't budge from their focal point on Drakken's chin. Although they can't move any higher, Drakken can almost sense them slicing their way up into his brain and reading the thought patterns. _He knows,_ something in him sputters. _He knows that I'm broke!_

 _Play it cool._ That's a hard little whisper, no bigger than the atom he never actually split. Steelier than any cell Drakken knew he possessed. He grabs for it without hesitation.

"Oh, I love those black helicopters," Drakken says. "They'd blend right into the dead of night, they have enough storage space for a hundred doom rays, and I hear they fly faster than the legal speed limit! If only they weren't so expensive," he adds offhandedly.

There. Since lying was unproductive, he told the truth in a way that wasn't completely lame.

Dementor toys with the check in his pocket as though he has no idea what to say, though Drakken's pretty sure he's had it all scripted for at least two minutes now. "To be actual," he says, "for any villain with even a MODERATING degree of success, Hench's prices are QUITE REASONABLE."

Blood runs hot down to Drakken's forearms.

"Oh, is that so?" Drakken says in his casualest tone. Whether or not "casualest" is a word, he doesn't quite know, so to calm the uncertainty in his chest, he props one foot up on the wall behind him as a demonstration of how he doesn't give a turnip if he gets picked up for loitering.

Problem being, his leg isn't really that long, and he stumbles backward into the plaster.

Drakken scrambles back to a standing position. He feels his moon-white cheeks flush in splotches, pink cousins of the purple one on his shirt. At this angle, where the bulbs aren't blinding, he can tell Dementor's skin isn't actually a nice healthy tan.

It's yellow as a jaundiced canary.

The best option would be to poke a finger at him and initiate the taunting straightaway. But something in the hold of Dementor's shoulders doesn't invite it - in fact, has Drakken momentarily wondering why he isn't yellow, too.

Drakken backs up several steps, shaking his head so that the marginal column of hair hanging down his neck sways back and forth like a pendulum. This is not how things were supposed to go. This is a _mistake_! The feelings of inadequacy and enmity (is that a word? He's pretty sure it's a word) can't carry over. When he first thought of fellow villains, that was exactly what they were meant to be - _fellow_ villains, other rejects united in their revenge-against-their-tormentors thirst.

Not people like this man - a yellowish version of Carl Thompson, handed everything he could possibly want and _still_ pining after world domination.

"And I am certainly sure you would vant only the best for your henchmen," Dementor says. A pitch that shrill should not be as abrasive as the grit of sandpaper. And yet this man somehow even manages to flout the laws of vocal physics!

"Wha?" Drakken replies, scraping the bottom of the genius barrel. He's suddenly conscious of how many times he's blinked in the past five minutes, how his contacts are probably squeezing skinny red fans out from his irises.

Dementor couldn't look more pleased - a hot, cool kind of pleased that forms a veil of menace that is at least equal to his helmet. "Oh, come now, Dr. Drakken," he says. "Everyone knows a villain is needs of someone to do ze dirty work and ze heavy lifting, _jah_?"

Drakken's never heard of _jah_ , and this man's accent is too thick for him to pick up context clues. He nods and then shakes his head and then shrugs.

Loath as Drakken is for this Dementor jerk to be right about anything, he's got him there: all the best supervillains in the movies have some muscle-bound lackeys to take care of the menial duties (AKA the stuff that isn't scientific or super-genius). Lackeys that follow unquestioningly, letting you experience a microcosm of the power you would taste as ruler of the world. The thought is luscious.

"I - I -" Drakken scans for answers, but his are cowards and have already retreated and hidden themselves from this man.

Dementor bares the bladed incisors again. "Vell, you are in LUCKINESS. Every villain worth their salt in weight rents from HenchCo. That is how I have got MINE henchmen - they are CERTIFIED and SUBMISSIVE and SPECIFICALLY SELECTED FOR SUCCESS!"

And now the man is screaming sibilants without so much as a speck of saliva. Drakken would yell that very sentence, except there's a lot of sibilants in _it_ , too, and he knows he'd spray down Jack Hench's perfect dress suit.

"Yes, well, wait until you see the henchmen I shall be getting!" Drakken says, and wobbly and anger-compressed though it may be, it could boom Dementor right out of the building. He rubs the sides of his neck, hoping to elongate his vocal cords - it's his one advantage. "They'll be superior - and satisfying - and sizable!"

Drakken tries to catch his own spit between his teeth; it only results in a glob of drool trailing down his chin. He licks it back in lickety-split - well, _lickety-spit_ in this case - and gets right to work pretending that never happened.

Dementor's eyes return to Drakken's Adam's apple. Drakken feels them scan in preparation of listing every single standard Drakken doesn't measure up to. And he doesn't need that list - he's spent the entire life he can remember marching to its tempo - or something that makes it sound more musical and literary than it was -

"You know," Dementor says at last, "I am becoming less and fewer worried about mine chances to dominate ze world."

You'd think after all the experience Drakken has with being treated like dandruff, he'd learn how to deflect it. You'd think they would build up, the way frequent-flier miles do, and reward him with a toaster - or at least a better response than freezing to the spot and squawking, "What?"

"Ohhh, you really are a newbie, are you not?" Dementor's voice is almost kind, and that only makes it cut deeper. "Vat is your gig, Dr. Drakken? Vat do you DO as a VILLAIN?"

The words play dead in Drakken's mouth. "Well - I - as a mad scientist, I like to consider myself a mad scientist - um - a genius - um - errr - gnnhh - here!" He suspends the sentence to dig around in his pocket and extract a business card that'll do the job so much better!

Dementor takes the card and apparently speed-reads it. Even the fingers that prod at it seem to be smirking. "Awww, how CUTE! Did you be making this your own self? With your little crayons?"

Drakken begins to blush furiously. "Wha...?" he says for the second time in less than one-hundred-eighty seconds. "No, I Xeroxed them. . ."

Dementor doesn't let him finish - how rude! "At ze library?"

"No!" The lie slides out of Drakken as if it's been greased. "I at least have my own copy machine!"

His breath comes in ragged chunks.

"Good, good," Dementor says. Drakken can't read anything from him - not in what he sees, not in what he hears, not in the solid presence he can't escape from. "You know, some vill say zat a villain is only as goodly as his equipment. Or his henchmen."

What that's intended as, Drakken may never figure out. Dementor has blanked every visible inch of his face as effectively as a rapid SELECT ALL/DELETE combo. It's a skill Drakken hasn't yet mastered.

Contrary to popular belief, he _can_ note that without envy. Why should he envy anything about Dementor? Successful as he may be in the field, he is _not_ Drakken's model for villainy.

The man's more like a maggot, only without the fat juicy belly that'll squish if you squeeze it. No, this guy has actual _abs_.

Once again, a factual observation without an ounce of jealousy on his part.

Dementor jabs a thumb back in Jack Hench's direction. "And his basic starter-yourself-pack army is only - let's see. In American courtesy, zat would be, oh, ten thousand dollars?"

"You're kidding!" explodes out of Drakken. Gets _pushed_ out, to be more accurate, by the cement-feeling walls now enclosing him. You hear of shucked corn crushing people to death, so who's to say frustration can't do the same? "That's - that's - that's _obscene_!"

Only one tiny neuron of his brain is free enough to commend him on a good word.

"Is actually quite a good deal," Dementor says.

"Less than five hundred dollars per henchman," Jack Hench allies himself with the little creep by adding. "You won't find a better bargain on the black market, Dr. Drakken, I guarantee you that."

Drakken slumps back against the wall, which has gone as cold and merciless as the company, and tries to force the image of a little boy, clutching the necklace he selected for his mother's birthday in one hand and a wad of loose change in the other, out of his mind.

"You know, perhaps, maybe, it is a not-bad thing, DR. DRAKKEN!" Dementor's sounding friendly again, even with the ends of his phrases climbing up the yell-spectrum.

Drakken makes sure to fix him with a narrow-eyed glower in return. "How so?" he grunts from the depths of his throat.

"Vell, if you vere in my league, ve vouldn't be able to be FRIENDS," Dementor says. The dangerous eyes flash at him. "Becauses no one standses between me and ze WORLD DOMINATION."

 _Idle threat, idle threat,_ Drakken's panicked mind throws out. _All supervillains make them. Mad scientists in particular!_

Whatever the case, Drakken forgets to maintain a tight grip on his balance and topples forward, landing in an ungraceful arch like a human Slinky. His heart throbs behind his belly button and something else tugs his sleeve and reminds him of an important thing he must do.

Actually, that's _perfect_! It'll give him an excuse to leave Dementor behind without _looking_ as though he's fleeing from another bully. Yet again. As always.

Drakken marches himself straight up to Hench and glares his eyebrow down until the edges of it are encroaching on his vision. "Listen up, Hench. I find myself - for reasons that do not concern you - in need of a bathroom! Where might I find one?"

Hench's own eyebrows fly up as he points toward a side door and relays instructions to go down the hall and it'll be the first door on the left. Behind him, Dementor lets out what can only be labeled a _guffaw_. Drakken turns his head away immediately from both of them, but an old pro like Dementor isn't going to miss the pink blotches on the back of Drakken's neck.

It isn't embarrassment that sends him scurrying from the room, shoulder blades afire with prickles, though. It's sheer primal fear.

* * *

Drakken lingers a few extra minutes in the bathroom, slicking back the black hair that wants to rebel into spikes, checking between his molars for tidbits from lunch and between his pores for any of the vagabond pimples that still sprout every now and then. He's never noticed how much his profile resembles a toilet's - wide, flat forehead over a bowl-shaped, out-turned jaw. Maybe if he grows his hair a little longer in the back, it'll balance out his face some. . .

That decided, Drakken takes to pacing, back and forth, back and forth, his sneakers squeaking on the linoleum. (He really ought to invest in a pair more businesslike - quieter - though he relishes the thought of leaving scuff marks on Hench's perfect floor.) Henchmen. Henchmen. What does he want in a henchman?

Well, if they do the heavy lifting, as Dementor says, they'll need to be big. At least bigger than Drakken, which - Drakken can admit now that he's standing before no one but his accusing reflection - isn't going to be too hard. Vicious enough to approve of world domination and revenge and want to help, but not so vicious to become competition.

Not like this Dementor fellow.

Drakken badly wishes he could press a button, open a panel on the wall, and reveal a secret passage that he could slide - whee! - down, tumbling right at the very parking space where he left the hovercraft he invented himself.

But if there are secret passages in Hench's building - and Drakken suspects strongly that there are - they are Hench's knowledge and Hench's alone. Made sense for the smarmy little wheeler-dealer. Which means he'll have to go back the way he came, and that means facing Hench and his new little pet.

Drakken mutters several more choice comments about Hench as he crosses back to the office. Hench receives him with an I-knew-you'd-be-back look. Professor Dementor is lurking near a bookcase, crouched down a little like a bobcat preparing to pounce.

If he's trying to ramp up the tension in the room, it's not - okay, it's working.

"Hope everything did come out ALL RIGHT," Dementor says.

Drakken pulls in his lips as though that can drain the pinkness from his skin, though he knows such a theory is not anatomically sound. Dementor exchanges nods with Hench in the most vexatiously knowing manner.

"Yes, well, thank you, Professor Dementor." Drakken tries to drown his voice in fake friendliness, the way Dementor did earlier. "You made me realize that I am, indeed, in need of a henchman army. And so I shall soon be - "

 _ERROR. ERROR. Insufficient information._

Drakken folds the arms that have never felt longer across his chest. "Where - where else do you get henchmen?" he wonders aloud. "Like, do you take out an ad? In the personals column or something?"

The little yellow guy folds _his_ arms across _his_ hefty chest. "You mean like in ze NEWSPAPER? And vat vould you SAY? 'Tall, scrawny science geek looking for substantial henchmen to assistance him in WORLD DOMINATION'?"

 _Geek._

It hits Drakken's bloodstream and morphs into doubt that thrashes inside him. It's the one word he was counting on never hearing again. The one that would be left behind to die in the ashes of Drew Lipsky's bespectacled, loser past, meant to fade away in the light of Dr. Drakken's impending notoriety.

Drakken rockets forward, snagging two handfuls of Dementor's stupid show-off coat, and his rage is only compounded by the fact that he can't pick him up; he can't even lift this runt off the ground. "Why, you are such a little - a little - " Drakken flounders, snags the first appropriately hip insult he can think of - "narc!"

Dementor stops just short of baring the teeth again. His eyes are slammed into incisions whose power can cut you, too. "Do you even know what ze MEANING OF THAT ZAT IS?"

It's a toil to sort out his grammar. And by the time Drakken does, everything that could be used as a retort has melted into banana pudding in his head. (Tasty - but ineffectual.)

"Someone who's on drugs?" he guesses finally, weakly, letting his fisted hands drop so that Dementor falls back into the position he never left in the first place.

Dementor smiles like someone who's one move away from winning an intense game of Dungeons and Dragons. He doesn't offer a correction, a comeback, an _anything_! It's more unnerving than the barbed-wire grin.

"So," Dementor says, hand waving as if the incident never occurred, "I suppose you always cans check for ze independent advertisings in ze _Villains_ magazine. Zey sometimes have people who are be willing to WORK CHEAP." He pronounces _cheap_ as though it's a dirty word.

Drakken lifts his gaze to the ceiling, since at least _it_ won't be laughing at him. "Well, I suppose I'll do that, then," he says, searching for some interesting stain to zero in on and knowing he won't find one, because Hench would never tolerate such a thing. "And I'll get me some fearsome henchmen, too. You just wait and see!"

The hate courses through him. Drakken lets it smolder onto his face like molten lead before he lowers it on the both of them. His nerve endings, overdrawn from so many years of holding back, are happy to give up and slacken.

Dementor produces a strange little noise, like something's grabbed onto his larynx. Intimidation, probably, now that he's seen what wrath the brilliant Dr. Drakken is capable of. "Marching to your own drumbeat, _jah_?" He reaches out and claps Drakken square in the concave of his back.

Right where the Bebe almost tore him in half.

A new type of pain shoots through Drakken, the type that burrows in too deep to get it back out. The type that just _stops_ you for a minute, pauses you right in place.

Several seconds go by before Drakken lurches forward, doubles over, ears ringing. Sore grunts bullet from his mouth.

Dementor looks at Drakken as if he's insane, and not with the type of fearful respect you bestow on a genius madman. Just a smear of contempt telling him he needs psychiatric help right away.

"Vat happened?" Dementor asks, eyes exaggeratedly wide.

"Your hurt my back!" Drakken despises the sound of his own whine, but he can't fix it, not with his lumbar region feeling like it's been whacked with a pinata stick. "It's - it's kind of. . . touchy."

"A touchy back?" Dementor repeats. "But you are - vat, fourteen?"

"I'm _twenty_." Drakken's contacts burn, and he bats his lids over them thirty, maybe forty, times in a row.

"Oh, of course," Dementor says. "My MISTAKEN." That volume of his could shear the wool off sheep. If only Drakken could collect it from the air and harness it into a weapon!

The vast shoulders bump up against Drakken's puny pecs. "Vell, I supposes that takes care of ze henchmen QUESTION," Dementor says. "But how are you ever going to be accomplish anything if you cannot afford ze WEAPONS?"

"I'll make my own," Drakken says. The sentence exits his mouth almost before it enters his mind. And yet he has no regrets, because truly, the longer he considers it, the more sense it makes.

After all, how hard can it be to invent a device that evaporates stone walls? He accidentally did it all the time with his chemistry set when he was a kid.

And what better method of demonstrating his genius? Any two-bit hack like Dementor can buy a pre-designed superweapon and conquer the globe with a lot of luck. All right, so perhaps there'd be a _little_ skill involved, but certainly nowhere near what would be required to fashion your own Doomsday device.

The phrase settles into his chest and tingles Drakken's entire being.

Hench folds his hands, forefingers pointing upward as though he's about to do that old _here is the church, here is the steeple_ rhyme. "Well, it'll be interesting to see what you come up with."

There is something so wrong about the way he says it, with the indulgent certainty of a tutor who already knows the answer, that Drakken slams both palms down on Hench's desk. "Good-bye, Hench!" he says. "I wish I could say it's been a pleasure, but it hasn't! As for _you_ , Professor Dementor" - he swivels to include the little maggot - "thank you again for the tips about henchmen. Other than that, it was terrible to meet you, and I hope to never see you again!"

Drakken shakes back his sweaty spike-bangs and stalks toward the door that Hench insists on walking him to. He adds one last "Just you wait!" and a shake of his fist just for good measure.

Behind him, Hench shoots him a smug smile and walks back into his posh little office. And Professor Dementor calls oh-so-pleasantly after him, "Good luck, Dr. Drakken!"

 _Good luck_ indeed! Drakken only makes it halfway down the hall before he has to stop and hug a wall, trembling from the release of his temper. He hasn't lost it like that anytime in recent memory - even when he told off his former posse, it was more controlled than this, closer to a tornado in a bottle than a tornado in a trailer park. So much has been building inside for so long, he knows he has more rants where that came from.

Which only makes Drakken more sure than ever than he's chosen the right dropout vocation. Supervillainy lends itself so marvelously to rants, and one day the world's going to sit up and listen, if only because it has no choice!

 _Yes, they'll see,_ Drakken reassures himself. _I'll show them. I'll show Possible and Chen and Ramesh. I'll show Hench and Dementor._

Drakken sighs down at the dried grape juice stain. A whole new set of people to prove himself to, and he doesn't even have henchmen yet.

He'll have to get started on that right away.


	18. First Kiss

**~All right, so I did it.**

 **I wrote D/S.**

 **Now, lemme be real quick to say that this isn't because I actively ship them. (In fact, I've come to believe Drakken really belongs with Lapis Lazuli from _Steven Universe_ , but that's a whole other story.*) But there were aspects of the idea of Drakken and Shego as a couple that I wanted to explore, so I figured I'd experiment with it. **

**At any rate, enjoy. . . especially if you're a shipper. And just consider it an AU from my other works.**

 *** = literally. You'll find it in the crossover section.~**

Many years ago in his former life as a supervillain, Dr. Drakken found himself stuck on a speeding train primed to self-destruct - which may have technically been his own fault, though he certainly didn't forget his most important notecard on _purpose_!

This should not be scarier than that. But it is.

Drakken and Shego have been a "thing" for awhile now. (The kids today say "thing." They also use "couple," "pair," and "item," only about half of which make any sense to Drakken.) And for the most part, Drakken's quite pleased with the results. Taking her to dinner is fun, especially when he gets to use his gentlemanly charms to pull a chair out for her. It warms his entire circulatory system from the chest on outward to see her light up when he brings her flowers - hydrangeas, her favorites. Her eyes have been such cold little flat pieces of moss for so long; Drakken loves watching them transform into something green and living again.

He likes holding her hand. The first time their fingers wove together, he's not sure who initiated it. He just knows they fit perfectly, two atoms merging to form a molecule. It filled him with lively jitterbugs, and it made Drakken want to run, though he wasn't sure if it was toward her or away from her. He even likes hugging her and playing with that huge cascade of hair that just begs to be batted at.

And yet when Shego looks up at him one day with a twitchy half-smile and says, "So how about a kiss, Doc?" Drakken's world is rocked by a 9.2 earthquake.

Not once during the entire time he's had blue skin has it turned any shade darker than the pink of Mother's hair. But right now, Drakken can feel it sizzling as crimson as the walls back in his old lair.

"K-k-k-k-kissing?" he stammers, in a voice too high to be his. "Gah gah gah gah gah gah. . ."

Shego groans. "I _would_ have to fall for the one guy in the world who doesn't jump at the chance to kiss."

Drakken blinks at the air as though the words have taken on actual physical form and condensed on it. He used to pride himself on getting people to fall for his _plans_ \- whole inventors' conventions, that naive clerk at Smarty Mart, and once or twice, even the great Kim Possible herself - but falling for _him_? That's been a foreign concept for so long.

It would be very flattering - quite the compliment - if Drakken weren't feeling as though his claustrophic self has been stuffed into a hamster ball with no air holes.

"Gah gah gah gah gah. . ."

It's never - does this make him weird? - kissing has never really crossed his mind in terms of relationship goals. He does watch Shego's mouth quite a bit, but only so he'll never miss one of her rare smiles. There wasn't ever any fantasy of it meeting his, not with so many variables to potentially go wrong.

Drakken pictures "couples" he's seen on TV, lips intertwined, chests pressed together, close enough to inhale each other's used air, and he shudders.

What are you supposed to do with your noses? How can he keep his saliva production from rapidly increasing or plummeting? What if he has to burp?

Most importantly, what bizarre phenomenon do you create breathing in pre-owned air ("pre-owned" being a nicer word for "used," Drakken remembers now)? It would be all carbon dioxide - very good for his flowers - does that make it a sort of mutual hyperventilation? _You breathe mine, and I'll breathe yours?_

Sounds troublesome enough to Drakken without throwing a kiss in.

"Gah gah gah gah. . ." Drakken continues.

Shego snickers in the affectionate way she does when the jump scene in a monster movie jolts Drakken up against the back of the couch. "Uh-oh, Dr. D. Did I finally break you?" she says.

That's a distinct possibility. Drakken wrings his fingertips dry and searches the ceiling for clues as to how to proceed.

 _Kissing was just never that high on my priority list,_ he tells himself in the worldless language that makes it so easy to communicate with his flowers. It isn't Shego's body he appreciates, except for how warm and strong it feels to hug, what a wiry cage her arms make around him. Drakken loves to observe her face, watch her lips form words, see her eyes come out of those cynical slants. She's as bewitching as a laser light held just out of reach.

 _And not just that_ , says another little whisper, determined to keep him honest. (Consciences - can't live with 'em, can't live without 'em.) _You're also frightened._

All right, so that's true. Even now, the fear is clinging to Drakken's nerve endings like that cobweb you just can't flick away. (Yeccch!) Though he's not as squeamish about being touched as he used to be, it's not like it's been much of a positive force in his life, either.

"Gah gah gah gah. . ."

"Okay. Seriously. Drakken." Shego waves her wrist in front of Drakken. The twitches are still there, but she's bordering on concern. "Say something. Anything."

Well, actually, _gah gah gah gah_ falls into the realm of "anything." Drakken, however, knows what she means. He works the shape of some words and finally pries them loose:

"At least we're not anglerfish."

Shego gives him a stare of utter blankness. "Say what exactly?"

"Anglerfish." Drakken warms to the explanation, to the one bit of scientific surety within reach. "When a male anglerfish wants to be with a female, he swims up under her and sinks his fangs into her underside, and slowly they become part of each other. Their bloodstreams even merge, so that any nutrition from what she eats also goes to him -"

Shego's upper lip pulls back. Only she can expose her gums and still look ladylike. "Leave it you to turn kissing into something sick and wrong," she mutters.

Kissing already _is_ something sick and wrong, as far as Drakken is concerned. This time, though, he knows better than to say it. He just glances all the way around the room, attention staying on an object for .5 seconds and then darting on to the next.

Now Shego's tapping her toe. "Oh, come on. What's the problem? Will this be your first kiss or something?"

Drakken listens for mockery and finds only a stray crumb or two. Just hearing her understand, even some tiny morsel, slumps him back against the bookcase and shakes his head for him and keeps the hitch in his throat from dissolving into a full-fledged panic attack.

"No," he says. "My second."

There's a long second of silence.

And then what little color Shego has drains straight out of her pointy face. "Oh my gosh," she says, almost in a gasp.

Drakken nods, scrunching his eyes shut. His memory, which could never manage to scrounge up details when it could be the difference between world domination or life in prison, is already flooding with everything about that horrible minute. The lips smashing down on him, so warm and firm that Drakken's could have been hunks of dead fish by comparison, so hard, as if to say, _Here, have some of my lipstick!_ His back crushed against the wall of the photo booth, discomfort spreading through every inch of his body -

"The Moodulator," Shego says. She fingers her neck like she can still feel the places where its little claws hooked in. "Geez, Doc, I'm sorry."

Drakken can't read her inflection, can't fathom whatever's happening behind those catlike eyes. But Shego nods at him, a new development in their relationship, one that means something along the lines of, _Tell me more - and I'll TRY to listen._

 _Deep breath. Deep breath,_ and then Drakken wades hesitantly into the topic like it's a river under flood warning. "The first time a girl's. . . err. . . lips ever. . . um. . . touched me, it was just my hand. We were just joking around and flirting - yes, flirting!" he snaps at Shego's raised eyebrows. "I was a teenager once, you know."

Actually, he's feeling more and more adolescent as the seconds tick off on his living room clock. Drakken's never noticed how loud and obnoxious it is when it's the dominant noise. His old villain demeanor would throw a beaker at it and command it to shut up, but that's not his M.O. anymore. He just doesn't know what else to do.

Except keep talking.

"Then, once in college, I was helping this girl get a cab," Drakken trembles out. "I was up late studying, she'd been to a party, had something to drink - you know, not apple juice - so I called a cab for her. I guess she was grateful, because she kissed my cheek. I'm pretty sure it was just because she was kind of drunk, but it was still a little. . . unnerving."

"That's one word for it," Shego agrees. Her narrow stare tells Drakken she could think of several stronger ones. He's busy giving her points for not saying them when she puckers her black lipstick all up at him. "So, never any 'mwah mwah mwah' on the mouth?"

Drakken makes a studious effort not to zone in on hers. He'd rather catch it in mid-twitch than slobber his own all over it. "Well, actually - there was one time sophomore year. This girl just ran up to me and attempted to - err - give me some 'mwah mwah mwah'. But I freaked out and pulled away, and she just caught me right here." He points to the bottom-right corner of his lips. "It wasn't very romantic, especially once she ran away laughing."

"Laughing?" Shego doesn't look surprised exactly, but the eyes aren't rolling.

"Yes." Drakken avoids the mirror over the fireplace, though he _is_ somewhat curious to see which color he's turned by now. "I found out later that she and her friends were playing Truth or Dare. She picked dare, and her dare was to go up and kiss Drew Lipsky right on the mouth."

Shego actually flinches, ever so slightly. "Ouch."

"Not to mention I have this thing about being touched, period," Drakken says. The words are beyond trembly now; they're jagged, scraping as if they were broken before they even made it out. "I could go into the entire psychological explanation, but I suppose I'll spare you. . . ."

"Don't need to, anyway." Shego parks her fists on her hips and scans his whole nervous being in one knowing sweep. "Grew up with bullies your whole life, blah-blah-blah, think every touch is gonna hurt you. I understand, Doc."

She does. Drakken releases his death grip on the mantle and blue seeps back into his knuckles again.

All of Shego's facial points hone in on him. Only the fact that he can't sense a heat-seeking missile ready to launch behind them keeps Drakken from cringing. "I wish I could say, 'When have I ever hurt you?'" she says. "But I can't."

The infernal ticking presides over the silence.

Shego abruptly breaks it with a violent palm-slap to her own thigh. "And do you know how bad that hacks me off?"

This time, Drakken does cringe, nearly all the way back into his collar.

Shego holds up both hands and speaks as though she's negotiating the release of hostages. "Whoa, easy there, bucko. I don't wanna scare you." She pauses and snickers. "That much."

Drakken sees absolutely nothing funny about the situation - about the "sitch," as a certain former nemesis of his would say. "The Moodulator thing was my first real kiss -" he begins.

"That so does not count as a real kiss," Shego says.

"But it still happened, Shego!" Drakken doesn't so much yell it - that would terribly impolite - as hiccup it, his fingertips floundering, unable to find each other because his arms have locked down so tightly at his sides. "And it about scared the hemoglobin out of me! Not that you're not dating material - I mean, _du-uh_ , right? - but I had no idea you had even been having those feelings for me, and - and - I was still focused solely on world domination then - and it just came so out of the blue! Or. . .out of the _green_ , I guess."

Shego throws a twitch his way. "You're blabbering."

"So I am." Drakken stops and waits for the scraps and scatters in his brain to settle down into something at least vaguely similar to orderliness. "How would you feel if someone tried to kiss you against your will?"

Shego sharpens further. "I'd kick his butt." It's not the liquid, snappy speech typical of Shego. It's pinched at the edges with something Drakken can't name that always fires protectiveness into his muscles (such as they are), even on these occasions where he's too needy, too graspy himself to do anything for her.

"Yes, well, I didn't have that option! A gentleman does not kick a lady's. . . rear." (Drakken congratulates himself on his decorum.) "And even if he did, I'm no match for you, Shego! Everyone knows that."

"Ding-ding-ding. Gold star for the Doc."

See, he _knows_ he likes her. How could he not? This kissing thing is just a whole other ball game.

And he's never done well in ball games.

Drakken nudges his boot into the carpet. "And in all those teen magazines I used to scour for ideas -"

"Oh, joy. Yeah, please share with us their wisdom," Shego says. The sarcasm is comfortingly thick.

"- they talk about dating guys who are 'good kissers.'" Even Drakken's nose is burning by this point, and he swipes at it with his sleeve. "I thought good and bad scores were for Olympic events, and kissing was just something that. . . _happened_ between people who loved each other! But what if I'm a bad kisser? How will I know? How will I get better? They don't exactly give lessons of that nature!"

Shego opens her mouth, then pulls it closed again, as if she wanted to say something and then changed her mind. It's a look Drakken recognizes, but he's never watched her face sort it out before.

 _Tick_. **Tock**. _Tick_. **Tock**.

Drakken shuts his eyes and his arms melt beside him, no longer taut but loose and too-floppy. The clear place blooms a sentence into his head.

"If you love me. . . . will you wait for me?" he finally says.

When Drakken opens his eyes, Shego seems to be wearing a mask of someone identical except for the smudge of bewilderment claiming her. Slowly, though, that mask breaks into a halfway smile.

"I will," Shego says. Her voice's texture reminds him of the first time he touched a snake - not soft, but not the frigid, evil scales you'd except, either. "If I have to. But - could you gimme one chance to show you it doesn't have to be like that?"

She stands there, attention locked on his, forehead hiked up to her hairline. Gosh, he likes her. And now that his brain isn't thundering toward panic at the moment, Drakken can remember other things he's seen on TV. Things that were warm and fireside-cozy, things he would gladly (if nervously) welcome.

But he's not a beautiful TV person, and part of him doesn't want her to be at a proximity where she can feel his sticky sweat, hear his nervous tummy, or read the sheen of doubt in his eyes.

Then again - this is Shego. She's watched him barf his guts out. Helped scrub the blood off the lair floors the day he acquired his scar. Rubbed relief into his poor weary back. If none of that has chased her away by now . . .

Drakken peers at Shego, at her already-recovered confidence and her everything-he-doesn't-have. "Just one chance?" he says.

"Just one." Shego draws an X over her heart with one long finger. "And if you don't like it, we'll. . . figure something else out."

She's dropped her wryness somewhere behind her and she's coming toward him without it. Drakken scratches under at his palm and at the nape of his neck and the back of his wrist - all the places that suddenly itch. He consults with the clear place to see if he's ready to take this risk.

And he nods. "One chance."

Shego takes another step forward. The clock isn't audible anymore over the pulse in Drakken's temples. He sucks in air that his air sacs can't remember what to do with and blows it back out.

"Relax, Doc," Shego says, still grinning. "You look like you're in front of a firing squad, for Pete's sake. I'm not gonna stick my tongue down your throat the first time."

Drakken's belly surges for the throat in question. "People DO that?"

Now, see, if he were Shego, he would have some really witty remark prepared about how that hasn't helped his confidence any. But he's Dr. Drakken, genius hero scientist who's right now struggling to even think in words.

 _Ish. Smish. Sandwish._

 _Drat._

Shego steps another step toward him, her forehead level with his nose, and her gaze runs up those few inches to meet his. Her eyes - those eyes that can slice through lies better than any FBI brainwave test - narrow. There must be a pallor to him, Drakken figures, announcing that his anxiety is a living, breathing thing inside him.

"Seriously. . . are you okay with this?" Shego asks, still scrutinizing every inch of him. "Because if I force it on you, I'm in the same category as your lovely cousin, and then _I_ might have to go throw up."

It's not sarcasm Drakken hears. Even under their usual wry snap, her words hint at understanding. Some of his fear - not all of it; perhaps not even most of it, but some - gurgles out of him like she's pulled a plug.

Drakken reviews the facts:

Although Shego's black lipstick can be a little creepy, it's not poison. She has no known communicable diseases. And she loves him - _loves_ him! - enough to accept a "no."

"I am now," Drakken says. He smiles at her, faintly conscious of the sloppiness of it. "Now that you asked."

When Shego smiles back, it's as though her face was genetically engineered so that all the features move in sync with one another. He can never hope to match her grace, her poise.

Drakken shoots up a brief prayer, does an even briefer run-through of the periodic table, and nods.

Shego backs up a ways, like she's giving him a smidge more time to adjust, before approaching him again, arms swinging at her sides. When she's close enough that Drakken can see the greenish tinge outlining the wave of her hair, she tips her chin up and, ever so lightly, taps her lips to his.

Her breath is warm against his mouth, and it smells like nothing at all. He scrolls back through his memory to see if he's eaten any garlic meatballs or anything lately. None that he recalls, though Drakken will confess that his memory operates on rather fickle competence.

But since Shego doesn't wrench herself away and start gagging, Drakken decides he must be okay.

The science of the situation begins to unfold for Drakken. Shego's applying firm, even pressure, as if she's tending a wound. The center of her lips lines up exactly with his, so that there's no awkward slide to connect. Even the tilt of her head, at a deliberate thirty-five-degree angle, has the tendons in his neck loosening.

It's not a movie-kiss, not the jamming, grasping kind where the heroine appears to be trying to suck the hero into her own body. It's a caring kiss, and that's what sends a flood of relief through Drakken's iced bloodstream like a sauna. He'd swear it even tingles all the way out to the end of his ponytail, which is scientifically ridiculous since hair is dead - keratin - and can't feel anything.

And then he's - is he pressing back? He thinks he might be pressing back, concentrating on following the blueprints Shego laid out for him, wanting her to feel as loved as he does.

Drakken has no idea when or how to end such an encounter, but luckily Shego seems to. (He doesn't want to seem as though he's impatient to be finished with the thing - even though he sort of maybe kind of is, it's so overwhelming!) She pulls back after a few seconds - minutes? Hours? - and loops her capable arms around his neck.

"So, Doc," she says, her voice playful, "did you like it?"

Drakken nods, struck mute. His brain is still scrambling to process an event written in a code its CPU can't decrypt.

The clock continues with its incessant tick-tocks, though they no longer sound ominous or like they're conspiring to deafen him.

Drakken's lips finally move, and he finds them none the worse for wear as he says, "I did. Maybe - maybe we could even do it again sometime."

Shego throws back her head and lets out a rich laugh that rings like someone jangling their pocket change (which adds a whole other meaning to the description "rich," Drakken realizes now). It's even more beautiful without the bitterness that has nipped so long at its edges. No words are necessary after hearing that.

In fact, Drakken's conditioned himself to the idea that it will be the only noise for a while, so he nearly ricochets off the ceiling when Shego's phone beeps - in his defense, it does so _quite_ loudly.

Shego pulls her phone out, not even bothering to hide her amused twitches as she checks the bar-of-soap-sized screen. "Yikes. I have to be at work in ten. I'll see ya tonight."

It still feels strange, her not working _for_ him. And yet, in a way, they're more of a team than they ever were on the wrong side of the law.

"All right, have fun!" Drakken says. He senses a smile preparing to spring to the corners of his mouth. "Be careful! Don't take any coins that appear to be made of wood. . . or whatever. . ."

Shego flashes him a grateful look and heads for his front door. That's when a question launches itself into Drakken's mind and refuses to be ignored.

"Shego, wait!" he cries.

She turns, fingers curled around the doorframe, half in and half out, frozen in time like a Polaroid he wants to keep.

"Was I good?" Drakken asks, fiddling with his shirt cuff. "I mean - did I do all right?"

For an instant, Shego's face is blank, unreadable. Then it dawns into her slow, sly smile.

"Let's just say" - Shego hikes one shoulder - "some things are worth waiting for."

* * *

Dr. D's never hidden his expressions very well. Something about their amped-up honesty makes it impossible for them to vanish behind a smirk the way most _normal_ people's can. It bugged him so bad when he was a villain.

When Drakken glances at Shego from under the long, spiky lashes that match his hair, _stunned_ doesn't do it justice. He might as well have just been Tasered - except for the goony grin that still scrunches his almost-chubby-again cheeks into little blue apples. That grin that makes everyone else's look like a Smarty-Mart-brand knockoff.

Shego closes the door behind her and jogs across Drakken's lawn toward his driveway. It's still mondo weird to associate Dr. D with a legit _house_ and a lawn that he actually keeps pretty neat ever since he became King Petal Pusher. The whole reforming gig, though?

Really works on him.

The layer of peace Drakken's wearing these days fits him in the same weird way the ponytail and lab coat do. Without the haunted bags under his eyes or the resentful clenching of his jaw, his face is dorky and sweet enough to be kinda handsome, even though it's obviously more Chip-n-Dale than chiseled.

Drakken's also been taking the touchy part of their relationship at approximately the speed of tar. And - yeah, it drives Shego a little nuts sometimes. But after what she just heard, she understands better. Dr. D's been traumatized in ways she hasn't been - he's so bungee-cord-resilient that it's hard to remember that. When he isn't whining about it.

'Course, he'd only had about thirty percent of a whine goin' on just now.

Dr. D. _does_ have other ways of letting her know he loves her. Tripping over his own feet to open doors for her, shyly telling her she looks pretty every time he sees her in something other than her jumpsuit, baking her cookies with green frosting on the usually-rough anniversary of the day she got her powers.

Plus, it's nice to be with a guy who _doesn't_ make it his life's purpose to jump her. Is she supposed to pay that back by jumping HIM?

 _Uh, no thanks._

What Shego's slammed with over and over again is how. . . _magical_ it all seems to be for Drakken. The first time they held hands, the look he dissolved into suggested he was nose-to-beard with Santa Claus or something. Their first hug? If Drakken's shimmer could be believed, she just raised the dead for him.

And then there was the kiss. Wow.

Although Shego doesn't surrender her lips easily, she's not Little Miss Chaste either. Yet Drakken's tentative, timid brush held a tenderness she'd never felt from a guy before, one more intimate than any tangle of tongues. He's so innocent. There was a time when she'd have loved corrupting that.

But it isn't every day somebody gets to repair their first kiss.

Shego clicks the car door shut behind her and spins the keys in the ignition. It felt like a first, for both of 'em, and who _even_ cares about the technicalities?

Yeah. She glanced up about halfway through the kiss and saw Drakken's eyes bulging like they belonged to one of those stress toys he was constantly squeezing. So the can't-keep-them-in-my-sockets-it's-all-too-magical biz isn't exactly what comes to mind when you imagine _romance_ \- nobody with halfway-decent vision could deny the guy was head-over-heels, either.

 _He's probably still staring at the door all dazed,_ Shego thinks with a snort. _He's such a big kid._

And everything in his life's an adventure - everything's all still so fresh and glossy for him, like that new roll of wrapping paper nobody's opened yet.

Shego checks her makeup in her visor. Huh, so the smudge-proof lipstick actually does its job. Of course, Drakken wasn't exactly clapping down hard. He was just. . . _there_ , clumsy, bumbling, tasting like bubblegum toothpaste and peanut butter sandwiches and nervous excitement. Her Dr. D.

That same sparkly-eyed man who was always at her side, even when she would've PAID him to go take a hike.

Even at drive-you-nuts-slow, it's neat to watch Drakken discover things in a way that doesn't take the gloss off. It's kinda like watching a little kid learn how to walk - you almost forget that you mastered it _years_ ago. Not totally swoon-worthy - she hasn't turned into a _complete_ sentimental dipstick - but a heck of a lot of fun.

Shego takes a second to squint in the sunlight burning through the windshield, snorting again when it clears. Drakken's got it together enough to stand at the storm door and wave, but he still looks punch-drunk enough that a bartender'd probably call a cab on him.

Dang, she enjoys him. No matter where kissy-face winds up fitting in.


	19. Final Rest

**~Follow-up to Chapter Sixteen. Sorry for the wait. Enjoy! That's a direct order. ;)~**

 _She brought the statue to the coffee shop._

Dr. Drakken thought nothing could possibly put a damper on his post-ceremony celebration. And just what is a "damper," anyway? What does moisture have to do with almost spoiling an occasion? Is it of any relation to the term "wet blanket"?

Whatever the case, on his way up to the counter to collect his order, Drakken carefully studies DNAmy. Her eyes are just as gleamy and her freckles just as cheery as ever. But that smile is being aimed at the Monkey Fist statue seated across from her at her table.

That wouldn't necessarily be the creepiest thing in the world, Drakken reflects as he collects his Styrofoam cup and watches DNAmy from over the plastic lip of the lid. When those new vampire movies came out - what _did_ the teens see in those, anyway? - there were women all over the place buying up life-sized cutouts of the boy-star and carting them around everywhere. It was disturbing but it wasn't morbid.

This, on the other hand. . .

This is no mere chiseled likeness. This is the stone embodiment of what was once a living human, now frozen in mid-grasp, forever suspended in limbo. Drakken's esophageal walls crawl toward each other at the thought.

Sitting next to DNAmy, diagonal-left from the statue, is a girl who's probably younger than Amy but doesn't appear as childlike. She must have not gotten the memo that those tops that bare your midriff are no longer in style. (At least Drakken assumes they aren't. Kim Possible covered hers up recently, and she's always been on the pulse of fashion trends - if trends can have pulses.)

Good. At least Amy has someone to talk to. _Someone, you know, alive._

Drakken shivers again and glances down through the flap-top at his beloved bubbly brown liquid - _raw sienna_ , if he were to match it to a crayon - and its yummy topping of fluffy whipped cream. Professor Dementor already went up to the barista and asked for pure black coffee, no cream and no sugar - which is, as far as Drakken can tell, the rough equivalent of drinking liquid charcoal. The only point is to show off how tough you are.

A month ago - a _week_ ago - Drakken would have gone up there and ordered the same to prove that his taste buds were every bit as virile as Dementor's. Probably might have even tried to one-up Dementor and order just coffee beans to grind up with his teeth or something. Now, as he gazes across the room at that metal helmet and that sneer that flickers on and off like a dying fuse, all Drakken can think is, _Who saved the world and who didn't?_

He never would have beaten Dementor at villainy, Drakken can admit to himself now. This saving-the-world thing - this is what he's good at.

That's what he should be doing.

* * *

Yes, well, Dementor's picked up on that, too. He spends the next twenty minutes extrapolating on Drakken's failed villain career and his success as a hero and the _irony_ of the whole thing. For the first time in twenty-some years, Drakken can't argue with the little box of a man, and it really gets his goat - and his goose, and other assorted barnyard animals. There's no way he can let Dementor be right, even though he is.

Drakken finally begs a change in subject. Dementor's response?

"Okay. Why the blue skin?"

Ooh! Now _there_ 's a story! One no one's ever even let him finish, at that.

Drakken is happy to launch into the cautionary tale of that fateful Tuesday and about the importance of stabilizing unpredictable chemicals.

It must take longer than he thought - well, when he tells a story, he _does_ like to elaborate on the details - because at its finish, the room is empty of everyone except Shego. This, of course, means DNAmy is gone, too.

Along with what remains of Monkey Fist.

Shego tips the barista and the two of them head out into the warm June night, Drakken still staggering and half-stupefied with wonder and joy, in a dreamlike state from finally being recognized. He's not too dreamy, though, to miss DNAmy's other companion, propped up against a slinky black convertible that looks exactly like the kind of car she should drive.

She's a kid, somewhere between the ages of graduation and legal alcohol purchase, with a former TV career and an arrest record of a whopping one. Of course, to _get_ that arrest, she tried to kill two boys in Kim Possible's life. One who she thought was Kim Possible's boyfriend, but he wasn't and never had been, and the other who _is_ Kim Possible's boyfriend now but wasn't yet. . .

Drakken feels his ponytail bristling so that the strands spike even more jaggedly than usual. He can't explain why he holds up a wait-a-minute-I'll-be-back finger to Shego and crosses the street and sticks out his hand to the girl.

"Hello, I'm Dr. Drakken," he says. "The one who just saved the world. And you're - you're -" _Blast you, brain circuits! Why do you always have to short out at the most inconvenient times?_ "- you're. . . Daredevil?"

"Adrena-Lynn," she says coolly. The girl wobbles on spiky high heels that could be used as lethal weapons and elevate her slick blond head an inch or two above Drakken's.

"Right, right!" Drakken takes a restorative breath (is restorative a word? Because it should be) and begins again. "I saw you hangin' with DNAmy at the coffee bar." _Ooh, yes, appropriate usage of youth slang!_ "Are you two...friends?"

"We met in prison, for what that's worth." Adrena-Lynn rolls her heavily-lashed eyes. "What's it to you?"

 _Prison_. The word drags anxious claws down Drakken's heart. Several gropes into his safekeeping-pocket are necessary, several touches of the medal's smooth, flawless surface, before he can forge ahead. "How - how is she doing?"

Adrena-Lynn parks her hands on the waistband of her jeans, which fit as snugly as if they've been drenched with water. "She's fine with the statue, if that's what you mean," she says. "She takes it places with her, hugs it, the whole nine yards. It's a little fuh-reeky" - she draws out the word and then chops it off so abruptly, it takes Drakken a minute to realize she's saying _freaky_ \- "but. . . if it makes her happy. . ."

That's kind of exactly what Drakken was afraid of. Though he knows his own mental health has been, historically, nothing to brag about, even he can see the cracks in this.

And just like that, the revulsion he felt earlier empties out of him. Amy Hall is no longer a psychotic man-eater. She's a poor, sad, lonely woman whose only friend is the stone remnant of someone who might have never liked her back.

"Yes. Well. Thank you for that information," Drakken says. "Good night."

Adrena-Lynn lifts one hand in a weak farewell. It's as though she's got a telemarketer on the line she can't wait to hang up on.

Drakken walks back to Shego, brain chasing its own tail in circles.

Come to think of it - how _would_ you end a conversation with a telemarketer once you're a good guy? Yelling threats and slamming the phone down aren't exactly the actions of a model citizen.

And then there's the whole Monkey Fist thing. Has everyone except DNAmy forgotten about him already? Drakken gets a little down when he thinks about it, but it doesn't cross his thoughts very often. Nor anyone else's, apparently.

Monkey Fist was such a lone wolf - lone _monkey_ \- except for those -

The one clear space in Drakken's mind flickers to life. It's not a save-the-world plan (which is fine, because the world doesn't need saving at this particular moment). It won't fix everything. But it might help the woman he once thought he loved.

* * *

Drakken doesn't have the guts to call Kim Possible. Her formerly buffoonish boyfriend is a whole different story. All it took was an apology and a few Bueno Nacho Bueno Bucks for the kid to forgive Drakken.

Not exactly the grudge-holding type.

The call is relatively painless. The kid answers the phone, identifies himself as "Ron Stoppable" - ah, yes, that name _does_ ring a bell - and seems fine with hearing from him.

"I have a question to ask," Drakken says after the "hi"s are out the way. "About Monkey Fist."

There's a long, hard silence before Ron says, "What _about_ Monkey Fist?"

His words are ice. Of course. The man _did_ try to kill Ron's sister, after all.

"Is it true he had no family?" Drakken asks.

"Yeah." The ice melts just the slightest bit. "They're all buried up at the Fiske family estate - which - dude - as if that place couldn't _get_ any creepier!"

"And what about the monkey ninjas?"

"They're still alive."

"Yes - but - where'd they go after Monkey Fist. . . " Drakken paws for the correct verb. ". . departed?"

"Oh, man, they were goin' bazonkers when me and Kim found 'em." Ron sighs into the receiver. "Monkeys are NOT my favorite animals, but I felt sorry for the little guys. KP called Animal Control, and they're still holding 'em, far as I know."

He does sound sad, and Drakken fiddles with the vine draping unnoticed-until-now tendrils down the side of his neck. An idea is sprouting in his mind, an idea as microscopic and fast-multiplying as a germ.

While he's never been formally introduced to the little creatures, indefinite police custody is a nightmare they don't deserve. If anything ever happened to _Drakken_ \- if Warhok and Warmonga had laser-fried him on the spaceship after all - he'd want Commodore Puddles to go live with someone who'd loved him.

And for Monkey Fist, that list narrows down to one person.

* * *

The monkey ninjas were transferred from Japanese Animal Control to one in the UK since Monkey Fist _is_ \- was - a British citizen. That's A-OK with Drakken. He's not ready to face Japan again, not ready to set foot into the country where the Diablos originated.

And at least this way, the guy behind the desk isn't speaking another language. Drakken has enough trouble with _English w_ hen his thoughts are lining up into one of those impossible optical-illusion objects, the set of stairs with no top or bottom step.

"I'm here to sign for the monkeys!" Drakken says to Mr. Behind-the-Desk. Oops - was that his announcement-of-a-hostile-takeover voice?

If it is, the man pays no heed to it. ( _Some_ things never change.) "The ninja ones?" the guy says.

Drakken's eyebrow lifts. "Do you have _many_ groups of monkeys here?" He tries to mask his frustration with a light little laugh. It comes out too dense, but it's better than the customary proclamation of his wrath.

"They belong to that crazy guy who got himself turned into rock?" is the next question.

For no logical reason, Drakken feels the bristles in his hair again. "He was my associate. And a good monkey master. And now I'm here to make sure his friends go to a good home."

The words rise up and out of the clear space and drift straight through the quizzical look the desk-man shoots him. In the span of a blink, Drakken's led down a hall lined with cages that uncomfortably remind him of his own time behind bars. He only starts breathing normally once he sees the monkey ninjas - still dressed in their black ninja garb, slumped in dejected piles of fur against the back of the cage.

When the key-ring-man unlocks the cage, the monkeys hurtle to the floor and surround Drakken in a shy huddle. Somewhere up there, they must remember him, because although he's not being greeted with monkey hugs or banana-scented kisses (which is also okay with him), they calm considerably at his presence. He's someone they've seen in the company of Monkey Fist before - albeit usually at odds with him.

Maybe that's all just petty now, now that they've been shaken up so badly. It's amazing what doesn't come back with you when you pull yourself back from the brink of disaster.

"H-Hello," Drakken stutters with a small wave. Black-scarved heads tilt in his direction. "I'm Dr. Drakken. I'm going to take you to your new home. And I can virtually guarantee you'll love it!"

The monkeys screech and applaud much as appreciative henchmen should. Drakken understands why Monkey Fist kept them around.

* * *

"So - are we running a monkey hotel now?" Shego says and removes a monkey's fingers from around her ankle. "'Cause if you _ever_ hope to sell this place..."

"They're not _staying_ , Shego!" Drakken bellows back at her, one squirming monkey tucked into each armpit as he reaches to pluck a third off the couch. It's odd, almost melancholy, to be back at his good old island lair and see the FOR SALE out front, see his favorite mugs and his comic book collections packed away in scribble-marked boxes. ( _Shego_ 's handwriting is, of course, perfect, even on the slippery surface of Rubbermaid.)

 _But, hey, it means we got to get the floors waxed again, so - can't complain._

"This very afternoon," Drakken continues, "I am going to fly to the Middleton suburbs and talk sense into DNAmy!" The statement would probably have been a lot more dramatic if he didn't trip over a monkey's tail and collapse to the newly-waxed floor.

Ow.

Shego hauls him up, mouth twitching. "Yep. And why don't you just pop on over and bring peace to the Middle East while you're at it?"

Drakken sticks out his tongue at her. Shego gives him a playful swat, and Drakken almost successfully dodges, grinning. He loves it when they both smile at the same time. Sort of like a Smile Jinx, only you don't rack up a soda debt.

Fortified by that - and by remembering the sensation of his medal, golden-warm against his chest - Drakken boldly sets out for the den inhabited by the deadly female of the species.

* * *

Okay, so maybe "den" isn't the best word to describe DNAmy's sugar-white little house, tucked comfortably into the middle-class suburbs.

Okay, so maybe it's about the farthest thing in the known universe from a "den," with its perfect picket fence and its well-tended green lawn that his flowers approve of and its birdbath where the bluebirds actually frolic the way they do in storybooks. Or _did_ frolic, before one especially mischievous monkey ninja ran up to play with them - or eat them; Drakken can't say - and they beat each other with their wings in their rush to get out of there.

Drakken pulls the monkey ninja away by one of his extremities - they all look so darn similar - and gives him a feeble "Bad monkey," almost as if he's disciplining a toddler. (Though the only toddler he's been around for any length of time is little Hana Stoppable, and she's fairly well-behaved, if you don't count running a few laps on the ceiling.) In that aspect, DNAmy's presence will be welcome. She's so much better at this.

They make their way onto the porch, Drakken still holding the squirmy ninja's hand-or-foot. This does, luckily, leave his pointer finger free to ring the doorbell. It has the same cheerful, echoing _cling-clang_ that instantly comes back to him from a few years ago, and in very little time at all DNAmy's peeping through the peephole dropped down to her height.

All Drakken can see is the top of her head, the split in her hair, like the Continental Divide, with all the hair on one side flowing east and all the hair on the other side flowing west. What a sight he must be - standing on her porch with a circle of bereaved simians, although Drakken suspects Amy Hall has seen stranger spectacles in her lifetime.

He hears her muffled squeal-gasp, and only then does Drakken have the chance to worry that she might be legitimately depressed and come to the door in her bathrobe. That's a little. . . cozier than he wishes to be. He's only seen his mother's jammies and Shego's nighttime head, hair immobilized by thousands of pink hollow sausages.

Fortunately for all of them, DNAmy's clad in her usual kindergarten-friendly pink sweater and matching pink pants, stuffed toy hanging as always around her neck. It's the first time Drakken's seen her since she was part of the group at the coffeehouse. She seems a touch paler than usual, and her bright eyes have charcoal smears under them, identical to the ones Drakken saw on himself when Warmonga first busted him out of prison. The clothes aren't hanging on her the way Drakken's did, though. That's DNAmy for you, all chubby curves and softness.

Right now, Amy's mouth is rounded away from her little tooth-gap. "Doctor!" she says. "What's all this?"

The question is most likely a rhetorical one, but Drakken opts to answer anyway, for speaking practice if nothing else. "Monkey ninjas." He does his best to shrug. "They were at Animal Control, but I thought they'd do better with you, so I-"

"Won't you come in?" Amy interrupts.

He would, but he might be cemented into place like a fire hydrant. The monkey ninjas, however, clamber inside, and Drakken has no choice but to follow them, peeling away his glove cuff and rolling up his sleeve to peek once again at the "cheat sheet" he spent the better part of the morning inscribing on his arm. Tips such as _Don't bad-mouth Monkey Fist_ , _don't treat her like she's crazy even though she is_ , and _stress happiness_.

What does that last one even mean? He doesn't remember.

Inside, feeling gorilla-gawky in her tiny house, Drakken carefully settles himself onto her amply-cushioned couch. It's just them - him, DNAmy, the monkey ninjas.

And - just beyond the doorframe in one of the many above-ground rooms that Drakken never really inspected - the Monkey Fist statue.

 _Holy mother of Tesla._

Drakken rips his gaze away and fastens it to DNAmy's cuckoo clock, which appears to actually be part cuckoo - and equal parts lion and kangaroo. Sweet. Monstrous. Cuddly and demented.

Okay, fine, telling himself not to look at the statue is just as well-nigh-useless as commanding himself not to look down whenever he's scaling a mountain. The thing is _right there_ , oddly smaller than Drakken would have expected. Monkey Fist's classiness and his bloodlust co-conspired to make him come across as large, but this body is as narrow as Drakken's own.

Monkey Fist was wiry, though, like Shego is, his body a tight string of muscle. Drakken can widen his own shoulders with pads, but they still have that awkward, bony, shoot-straight-up look. He's never achieved a tough build, and he probably never will.

That's okay, he tells himself. In science, no points are deducted for being gangly.

Certain details must have gotten blurred out when Monkey Fist shifted into stone. Others were preserved uncannily - the elasticity of his sleeves, the tousled-but-not-messy texture of his hair, the rectangle of his jaw.

It's easier, much easier, to examine those details than to focus on the expression or the body language. _That_ wedges a lump in Drakken's throat. This scream isn't Monkey Fist's usual furious-simian screech. It's the long, drawn-out cry of someone who's staring their end right in the face.

Terrified.

Drakken shivers himself into goose bumps. It only reinforces his new objective in life, despite all of Dementor's wisecracks - to do everything in his power to ensure that no one else wastes their last few moments begging and afraid.

What did Monkey Fist think he was preparing to face?

No. Not right now. This situation is sad enough without imagining Monkey Fist's everlasting fate.

"So!" Drakken says, as brightly and nonconfrontationally as possible, swiveling toward DNAmy. "Have you had any friends over recently?"

DNAmy shakes her head. "No. But I did visit with Adrena-Lynn at the coffeehouse last week."

Was that really only last week? Twenty lifetimes seem to have passed since then.

"Well, that's good," Drakken says. "She seems. . ." He searches for any positive quality of Adrena-Lynn's. ". . . female."

"Female?" Amy squints at him; it would resemble suspicion on anyone else. "What's that mean?"

She's not asking for a scientific explanation, Drakken recognizes. He shuffles his feet on the area rug. "Um - nothing really. Just that it's nice for you to have girl friends, that's all. Studies have shown that people who are lonely are also more likely to develop. . ." The screen in his brain winks out without so much as a _Low Battery_ warning - how rude! "Depression, I guess. Or maybe brain cancer."

That's it. Legs won't stay still. Drakken rises and commences a mad-scientist pace down and back up the hallway.

Upon passing the room Monkey Fist occupies, Drakken slips in front of the door and arranges his hands behind his back so they can make a stealthy fumble for the knob and ease it forward. Once the door clicks shut behind him, Drakken gets the same shot of relief he used to have when he dumped a knapsack full of heavy textbooks onto the floor at the end of a long day. He dusts his hands together and returns to DNAmy.

"Was Monty bothering you?" she asks.

Okay, so maybe his stealth isn't anything to write home about after all. Or maybe it _is_ something to write home about, something noticeable enough to be shared. . . which equals flunking in the stealth world.

Drakken wrings the confusion from his mind and twiddles his fingers together. "Maybe. It's kind of. . . interesting that you still have it - him."

There. "Interesting" isn't an insult.

So he's surprised to see DNAmy's eyes swirl with the first hints of sparks. "You too?" she asks.

"Me too what?" Panic barrels through Drakken, but he shoves it aside. Who knows, maybe she's just practicing for a _Julius Caesar_ audition she never told him about.

"Do you know what your sidekick said to me at the coffeehouse that day?" DNAmy demands.

Drakken feels himself going into a full-body cringe. Shego's only had about seven days' practice being gentle, and that's just with him. "No. What?"

"She said, 'Don't you have another boyfriend by now'?"

 _Sounds like Shego all right._

Tears crack through DNAmy's attempt at bitterness. "Like he's my _toy_. Like one man's as good as any other man to me!"

Actually, Drakken's been fairly convinced that's true ever since she handed his heart back to him after taking a bite out of it. (Not in a literal manner, but it could hardly have hurt worse.) And yet now that Amy herself is saying it, with a great sniffling effort to not cry, Drakken wants to scold those uncharitable thoughts.

But now is not the time for self-flagellation (a super-sophisticated way of saying "mentally lashing yourself with a whip"). He is on a mission. Two missions, in fact. Twin missions. Twinssions. ( _Oooh_ , he'll have to share that one with Stoppable!) And, in his head, they are every bit as lively and eager as both sets of real twins he knows.

One of those missions all but takes care of itself right away. The monkey ninja who chased the birds approaches DNAmy and shyly latches his hairy fingers around her stubby ones. Her face immediately fills with the trademark DNAmy-light that always overtakes it whenever she looks at an animal.

"Hi there, Chippy!" she coos. "Have you been a good boy? Have you been behaving yourself for nice Dr. Drakken?"

Actually, _no_ , he hasn't, but the only thing that really comes to Drakken is the fact that Amy knows this ninja's name. Probably knows _all_ their names. He was right - this is _perfect_.

"Chippy" climbs into DNAmy's lap, and she bends down to snuggle into the fur on his neck. It's a sweet image, although how Amy can withstand the smell is a mystery to Drakken.

He glances sideways at her and is rewarded with a hint of her splendid smile. "Did. . . did you bring them here for me?" Hope tiptoes across Amy's words.

Drakken bobs his head. "Yes. They've been through a very traumatic experience, and they need someone to take care of them and love on them - and I can't think of anyone more qualified for the job. Well, except for my own mother. But she has this thing about prehensile tails. . ." His voice sounds too big and billowy for DNAmy's quaint little living room, and he lets it die.

DNAmy's black eyes grow shiny again. "Thank you, Doctor," she says.

Drakken responds with a wordless nod, the only viable choice for a mad scientist whose power of speech has shriveled up and blown away like one of those tumbleweed things out west. It's hard to stay mad at her, despite what she's done to his emotions. She's lonely, like he was. Only creepier.

Which brings him to the next stage of his twinssion. The other twin. The evil twin - well, not _evil_ , but difficult.

Dealing with a woman like DNAmy is like working with an equation where every term is an unknown. Even if you manage to solve it for one variable, you'll only end up with all the others piled atop each other.

Drakken squirms on his seat again. He wishes one of the henchmen were here; he wishes to delegate this uncomfortable responsibility to them and run far, far away. They've proven themselves to be great comfort objects in times of crises - certainly much better than he.

How does it all fall on him, anyway?

When Drakken clears his throat, a splintered sound pierces the air, and it leads pretty easily into, "Errr, Amy, that's another thing I wanted to talk to you about. The statue. It might - I think - maybe - it needs to go."

Drakken's never thought of DNAmy as having a neck before. Not until now, when it comes forward in an indignant stretch. "What are you saying?" she asks.

"Now, now, hear me out!" Drakken holds up his hands, shaking them, as if he expects Amy to reach out and slug him. While DNAmy's about the least violent person he's ever known, if any statement could move her to throw a punch, it would be his last one. "Stoppable told me that Monkey Fist's entire family is dea - deceased. And buried up at the Fiske family estate. I thought it would be. . . nice if he could be there with them."

At least his _body_ can be near theirs.

Silence reigns. Is that good or bad? Positive or negative?

What Drakken doesn't expect is the twist to DNAmy's next phrase. "And then I can _move on_? Get a new boyfriend?"

"No!" It snaps on the way out, and Drakken hastens to smooth it over with, "No, no one's saying you have to move on. Good grief, my mother never remarried, and it's been thirty-four years since my dad left us!"

 _That_ statement did _not_ have takeoff permission, and Drakken stares hard at the floor, lips crushed together.

"Your mother?" DNAmy finally asks. Gently. Caringly.

He nods.

An even longer silence.

Drakken takes an achingly enormous breath and forces himself to continue. "But she didn't let it stop her from living her life, either." He gets to his feet and heads for the front door, flinging it open and managing not to yelp when the faux-gold knob collides with his similarly-shaped wrist. "Look outside, Amy. The sun is shining, the grass is growing, the dogs are going to the bathroom on their lawns across the street. . . oops."

 _Think before you speak, Drakken._ That's on his cheat sheet somewhere.

"Well, errr, strike that last one!" Drakken inches over the doorway, knowing his cheeks are pinking. "But the point being - the shine is sunning - err - the sun is shining, and the grass is growing!"

"And Monty is gone," DNAmy says flatly.

Sigh. Now comes the part where it's really hard not to break the no-bad-mouthing-Monkey-Fist rule.

Drakken wished, so many times after Amy turned him down, that she would come to regret falling for Monkey Fist. And now that she is, it's not even enjoyable. Why'd Monkey Fist have to up and _die_ on her instead of just telling her he was no good for her and advising her to go with that nice Dr. Drakken fellow instead?

Amy's eyes narrow as if they can read his brainwaves. "I know you didn't like him, Doctor, but there was a part of him. . ."

"I never saw that part," Drakken says without thinking. "But I believe you!" he blurts even faster. "I mean, if anyone could see it, it would be you. And that part of him wouldn't want you to be _completely_ miserable!" He bounces a nervous gaze across the monkey ninjas, working his way back to DNAmy's.

"I'm not _completely_ miserable," Amy says. "I still have my Monty around."

Oh boy.

Drakken shakes his head, surprised by how lightly his ponytail grazes his shoulders when the rest of him is closer to heavy-duty lead. "See, that's the other thing. I don't think you should be hanging onto that statue. I mean, I know they say there's nothing wrong with keeping some mementos of a lost love, but - but - but carting around their - their - their husk is unhealthy. Ask anyone! Ask my shrink! Ask Opera!"

At long last DNAmy giggles. "Oprah."

"Her, too!"

He hopes that helps, but DNAmy still peers at him, wetly and narrowly. "I thought I could count on you to understand, Doctor. I thought _you_ wouldn't try to tear us apart, too!"

Drakken feels stung, as if a thousand insects have attacked him. The pain claws into his pores, and he finds himself yelling:

"Doggone it, Amy, I just happen to _care_ about you! You're still so young - and you're so friendly - and you need to be out there living your life, and I hate to just watch you throw it all away for someone who -"

The words are rage-pure in his mind. The cheat sheet has long since disappeared. All that remains stronger is the clear place, flowering, telling Drakken that no, he will _not_ smite her in her grief.

Drakken doesn't know if that sentence is redeemable, but he swallows the imminent, _who never even loved you anyway!_ ". . . who can't love you in return anymore," he finishes.

And more silence.

DNAmy wipes at the tears that have managed to slip out the way Shego always sneaked out of prison. "You're saying mean things," she says, "but I don't think you're trying to be a meanie."

The lump in Drakken's throat tightens with exasperation. "No, I'm not trying to be a meanie. I care about you. And in some warped way, I care about Monkey Fist. I want him to at least be buried with his family."

"He can't run away when I hug him anymore," Amy says, almost to herself.

Drakken comes back and sinks back onto the couch, feeling tiny even as he towers over her. "But he can't hug you back, either." His fingertips feel lost and naked without each other, and Drakken taps them together. "There are people - you know, people out there in the world - who would be happy to - to hug you. If you needed a hug. There are - you know - people."

By now, Shego would be rolling on the floor laughing (or _ROFL_ , as the teens today say in their text messages and such).

DNAmy isn't. She gives him that look - that tender, reach-inside-of-you-and-feel-sorry-for-you-look that, in spite of everything, still makes every cell in his body stop replicating. "I still miss him," she says.

Drakken nods. Much as he doesn't _want_ to identify with her. . . he does. He's rather disquieted by the whole thing himself.

"I know," he says. "It's an awful thing."

Chippy returns to wrap his arms around DNAmy's legs and make a soulful screeching sound at her. Drakken's clear place blooms to life - it's all he can do to keep from leaping to his feet and crying, "That's it!"

Instead, he says, "Okay, Amy, listen," with kindness he doesn't need to manufacture. "I don't know if the monkey ninjas and the statue can coexist. I know they're really, really smart creatures - I've read about some of the things people have been able to teach them - well, monkeys in general, not these specific ones, and they're probably even smarter than average! But I don't think they'd be able to understand why they couldn't wake him up, and it would bum them out. They might even have PTSD."

"PTSD?" Amy's little eyebrows twist together.

"Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder," Drakken says. Maintaining eye contact is hard; his burn with the urge to drop to his lap. "It's when something awful happens to you and it keeps messing you up even after it's long over. I've been seeing a psychiatrist, see, and he thinks I have it - thinks I got it when I first got out of prison for, you know, the fast food attacks. Every time I saw a Bueno Nacho, I would throw up or have a panic attack or something. The monkeys might get that way about the statue because it reminds them of how awful that day was."

Yet more silence.

After what could be anywhere from ten seconds to three hours, DNAmy's slump-shouldered posture straightens. Her cherubic little face sets in resolve. "You really think it would be better for them?" she asks.

"Oh, yes, yes!" Drakken says.

"And they need me?"

"You're the only one who understands how hard this is for them, right? You could still help Monke - Monty by helping _them_."

Amy clasps her hands together and holds them beneath her chin. "Well - I suppose I could maybe _try_."

Happy sadness and sad happiness rush through Drakken and pump his fists into the air and back to his chest. One glance at DNAmy, however, and his victory whoop stutters and dies. The clear place assumes command and says through Drakken's mouth, "I can give you a few days. To say your goodbyes."

A look of real gratitude spills from DNAmy. Her "Thank you, Doctor" is hoarse.

Drakken's own body is swaying a bit, his nerves unsteady and overwhelmed. So overwhelmed that he's not at all shocked when he glances down and spies a sunshine-yellow petal flopping over the collar of his lab coat.

The delicate brows go up. "Those are new," Amy says.

Drakken permits himself to laugh - just a small, mild chortle - for the first time in hours. "Oh, man, do I have a _long_ story to tell you!"

And a minister to hire. And a burial to plan. And a way across the Atlantic to find.

The stress is very much there, but the other side of the equation is being counterbalanced by something else. Not anger, not fear, not vengeance.

And not a flutter. This is firmer, stronger, weighty but not cumbersome. He's no longer sure if ceasing cellular reproduction bodes well for a relationship.

No, this is a feeling - a foreign-until-last-week feeling - that seems to submerge his entire being in a hot tub and let it rest. A feeling that says, in a newly non-sarcastic version of Shego's voice, _You done good, Dr. D._

 _You done good._

* * *

Senor Senior, Sr. agrees to lend them one of his helicopters in a New York minute (a phrase Drakken has never particularly understood, since minutes in New York are the same length as minutes at every other point on the globe). In fact, Senior gets a little misty-eyed when Drakken tells him the reason. And before Drakken's departure, Senior gives his wrist a squeeze with fingers roughened from a lifetime that must've not always been as cushy as it is now.

It occurs to Drakken - drops on his head like a falling chestnut, to be more accurate - that he doesn't know Senior's story, just like he never knew Monkey Fist's, just like he doesn't know DNAmy's and only knows part of Shego's. Not every villain is as forthcoming with their backstory as Drakken used to be, and Monkey Fist was especially close-lipped about where he came from and where exactly he was going, "ultimate monkey master" notwithstanding.

And those are just a few people in his life! To think of a whole planet. . .

Drakken imagines all those stories as the millions of textbooks crammed and stacked in Global Justice's print archives. Not even Dr. Director has personally cracked every cover, because - Drakken helped calculate this once - it would take one person 36,085 years to read all of them. And unless the human lifespan drastically increases over the next few decades, that's not happening.

(Heck, he's still stumbling into _never-been-here-before_ s in his own story, and he's been living the thing for the past forty-two years!)

Procuring a minister was harder. Drakken bounced around (via phone) for quite a while before he finally located a reverend - or is it a priest? A pastor? - who recognized the Fiske name. Drakken's rather unschooled in church matters, he'll admit, and he hasn't a clue how to inspect the man's credentials. But the voice on the other end was warmly British, no stereotypical snoot, and listened to the story with a minimum of _tsk-tsk_ ing at Monkey Fist's foolishness.

When Drakken was finally able to wind himself down - objects in motion tend to stay in motion, and his tongue is no exception - the minister said, "Yes. I would be honored."

Awe destroyed all of Drakken's educated speech. "That," he said, "would be the bon-diggety."

(He still wants to bang his forehead into the wall every time he remembers that.)

Drakken's glad, however, that the man used that word, "honored." As not-quite-fond of Monkey Fist as he may have been, Drakken doesn't want to have his body just dumped into a hole and dirt thrown over it.

(This is starting to scare him. He's not used to being this nice.)

The gravestone was a nightmare. (Literally - he woke up in a panicked sweat the night after they ordered it.) After two hours of looking through catalogs and an additional hour-and-a-half on the phone, Drakken hopes it will be a long, long time before he has to purchase another headstone. For numerous reasons.

Every stone, of course, came with the option of adding a phrase such as "Beloved Son," "Devoted Husband," or "Loving Father." The last two never happened, and Drakken doesn't know enough of the story to judge the first. It leaves even the vines at his neck dragging as if their buds are too heavy for them.

He and DNAmy finally decided on a simple "Rest in Peace, Lord Montgomery Fiske," which Amy spelled out for the engraver. Drakken was grateful to her - Global Justice recently diagnosed him with dyslexia, and stress of this order would be an impediment toward spelling his _own_ name.

Drakken selflessly suggests the helicopter be just for DNAmy and Monkey Fist so that she can express her more private farewells in. . . well, in private. (Okay, not _completely_ selflessly. He can't abide being within twenty feet of that statue.) Since they'll be gone less than half a day, and since Drakken suspects the monkey ninjas have already said their goodbyes, Drakken doesn't have to pilot a pile of squirming simians across the Atlantic, either.

The hovercraft ride to London isn't as lovely as it usually is. Sky the same color as the statue. A dribble of rain that reminds him of the drool a fifty-foot Commodore Puddles produced. A rumble of distant thunder every now and again.

Although Drakken is factually aware that the June-collision of warm fronts and cold fronts is responsible, he can't help but entertain the notion that the atmosphere was purposefully fashioned for a funeral.

With the help of his trusty GPS, the one he's dubbed Ferdinand Magellan, Drakken locates the Fiske estate. The place does seem to belong in a horror movie, all spires and spikes, wooden doorways and drafty-looking walls. Ghosts are a scientific impossibility, but if there were anywhere it wouldn't be such a surprise to run into one, it would be here.

Drakken takes off for the one spot of color on the grounds - DNAmy, in her usual pink, brandishing a brave smile. He reaches her side and takes her small hands in his not-much-bigger ones, and his heart doesn't even skip a beat. Quite simply, it's the right thing to do.

The minister, who looks a little like a hound dog, extends his arm to the both of them. "Brother Kingston," he introduces himself.

Drakken returns the handshake. "Dr. Drakken," he says softly, not eager to breathe so much as a wrinkle into this man's fancy suit.

"Amy Hall." DNAmy sounds clogged, as though the sobs she's expecting are being delayed somewhere up in her sinus passages. His squeeze is wimpy compared to Senior's, but Drakken offers it anyway.

Streaks of warmth appear in Brother Kingston's eyes - right in the centers, where Drakken is so accustomed to seeing nonrecognition and blue-induced discomfort. "I'm terribly sorry for your loss," he says.

"Thank. . . you?" Drakken says - at a loss again. At least he doesn't revert to teen slang this time.

DNAmy drags Drakken by the sleeve over to the open maw of earth. Drakken slams his gaze on Brother Kingston's halfway-bald scalp to keep it from straying to any of the stone structures depressing the already-grim landscape. There is a moment of pure silence, another novelty to Drakken.

Brother Kingston raises his hands and begins. "Dearly beloved brethren -"

Drakken adds a whispered, "And sisteren," just to be fair.

"- we are here to mourn the loss of Lord Montgomery Fiske - and to celebrate the enduring compassion of his friends, Dr. Drakken and Amy Hall."

Friends?

 _Ah, well._ Drakken sees no need to correct him this time.

Especially not once the minister tells the tale of Monkey Fist's tragically short life, recites the tragically _long_ list of relatives who "preceded him in death," and closes with a prayer.

Drakken closes his eyes and bows his head, the way he did when he assumed he'd blown Kim Possible straight into the afterlife. Raindrops smack his face in cold contrast to DNAmy's hot tear landing on the curve of his thumb.

 _Well. . . Monkey Fist, I'm sorry I mocked your hairy toes that one time. And I suppose it really doesn't matter whether you could build a Doomsday device or not. I'll make sure your monkey ninjas are taken care of. Goodbye._

When Drakken's eyes open, all he can think is that the hole has perfect, rectangular proportions, though he can see, hear, _and_ feel DNAmy crying beside him.

Portions of Drakken feel watery and unstable as well, and he wishes he could let them drain too. But his tear ducts resist his control, and he can't start the tide any more than he could ever stem it. It lingers, waiting in a bruise just below the surface.

The statue is lowered into the ground, and a couple of workmen approach with shovels. They appear rather uninterested, which disturbs Drakken all the way down to the bone marrow.

Brother Kingston saves the moment by raising his hands and dipping his own head over the hole. "In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost," he says, and somehow Drakken can tell he is finished.

An "amen" comes out of Drakken, from someplace he hasn't had much chance to explore yet. It fits, and he means it.

"Amen," DNAmy sniffles.

And Monkey Fist disappears beneath the soil.

No coffin or anything, because stone doesn't decompose. It can morph into other kinds of stone, however, under the right conditions.

This knowledge doesn't help Drakken much over the next few minutes of Brother Kingston leaving and DNAmy continuing with the sobbing. By the time she spirals back down, the rain is coming down in a spit, soaking her already-wet form.

Only one section of Drakken's mind speaks up, and he edges in closer to her, holding his hand like an awning over her head. "We better get home before we both our d - I mean, before we catch cold," he amends himself lamely.

DNAmy peers at him for a long, deep-down time. Her smile eventually brightens her face like a light bulb filament. Even with the hard cinch of memories in his gut, Drakken has to admit it's still a very likable smile.

He's fine with that, he really is. The problem doesn't start until she flings her arms around him and cracks three of his vertebrae in one clasp.

 _Ahhh . . . didn't even know those_ needed _to be popped._

Another chestnut nails his cranium. She's single again.

Well, who knows? He might not be the most charming or handsome or manly guy in the world, but he's pretty darn sure he can outdo a stone statue.

Not to brag or anything.

It isn't a chestnut to the head this time. It's a needle straight through the occipital lobe. Amy, in his memory - _"like one man's as good as any other man to me."_

No, in yet another new twist, Dr. Drakken has no desire to brag. He just stands there, remembering how warm and affirming her arms have always been.

And how fickle.

Drakken's stomach doesn't come alive with butterflies. It just bogs as though burdened with a seven-course meal. His self-esteem is being built back up slowly, like the wolf population in Yellowstone. (He read about that in _National Geographic_.) And while Drakken would suddenly bet that DNAmy never meant to hurt him, one pull from her and it might all come tumbling down.

Stepping out of her hug is harder than surrendering to the authorities, but somehow Drakken does it, places his hands on his hips. "Amy, we need to talk."

The freckles swing up to beam at him. "About what?" she says.

Drakken doesn't hesitate this time - objects at rest tend to stay at rest, and his tongue is no exception. "About us."

Amy's forehead puckers, a sight almost strange on so childish a face. "What _about_ us, Doctor?" she says.

"Gnngh! I believe you know very well what about us, Amy!" An old anger grabs hold of Drakken's words and distorts them. "Don't make me say it!"

He will not say it, he will not surrender himself to the pain of voicing it aloud.

DNAmy wilts, which under different circumstances might make Drakken feel like a cad. "You mean the time you -"

Nope. It'll hurt even worse hearing her say it.

"The time I proposed to you and you turned me down, yes!" Drakken's fists rub at his sides, chafing even against the silken fabric of the dress slacks he picked out specifically for the service. "You really hurt my feelings, you know."

DNAmy's already thin mouth constricts further, nearly vanishing into her cheeks. For once, she has nothing to say. Nothing that could come out in her customary chirp, at least.

"I know I kind of rushed into it a bit," Drakken says - quite generously, as far as he's concerned. "Apparently you're supposed to know someone for more than a day and a half before asking them to marry you. But it's still your fau -"

All right, so maybe Amy isn't the only childish one. Drakken has to literally swallow the accusation he was about to spew at her.

He waits until his tone has sufficiently gentled before he continues. "I mean, it still wasn't very kind of you to lead me on."

DNAmy's entire body seems to startle. "Lead you _on_?" she asks.

"Yes," Drakken says, commanding his voice to remain level. It doesn't listen any better than Shego ever did, not with the pressure building around his Adam's apple. "The flirting, the hugging, giving me cute nicknames. . . only to turn down my proposal. Guys don't like that, Amy."

Amy quiets for a second, snagging a strand of hair to twist it around her finger - although it's too short and ends up springing roughly back into place.

"Are you going to say a woman shouldn't flirt with a man unless she's ready to marry him that very night?" she finally says. Her words are DNAmy-soft, but there's a hint of bite to them. Also some truth.

She could splice his DNA with that of a Gila monster, turn him into a real-life version of The Lizard from Spider-Man. But this is scarier.

Drakken shuffles in the still-slightly-too-big hips of his pre-prison-size pants. "Well, I was," he admits, "until you said it like that, and I realized how stupid it sounds. So now I'm going to say something else. . . "

Thinking of that "something else" should be a cinch. There are a lot - a _surfeit_ was the word Dr. Director used last week - of fascinating topics to discuss: the weather, still slate-gray with the type of rain you have to squint through; how long it takes mold to grow on different varieties of bread; whether or not Pluto should still count as a planet. Unfortunately, it has to be something tailored to _this_ particular conversation, and _that_ 's where Drakken is stumped.

A brisk pace gets the blood flowing to his brain again, as well as the chlorophyll flowing to his vines, which come out as if he invited them to play. The clear place flickers with clean bits and bites until he has a sentence wide enough to speak.

"I guess what I'm going to say is that a woman shouldn't flirt with a man when her heart belongs to another man and she can't even go out for dinner or come see his lab or whatever people do on dates," Drakken says.

It must make sense to Amy, because her rounded shoulders sag out of their sweet little mushroom-esque shape. "You're right," she mumbles.

Now, _there_ 's a sentence Dr. Drakken hasn't heard enough of in his life!

Drakken could swear his ears prick up at the sound of it. "What'd you say?"

Amy doesn't repeat herself, just stares miserably down at her toes. "I guess I _did_ lead you on," she says. "I never dreamed you'd fall for me that fast. I guess. . . I guess I just don't know how _not_ to flirt."

Something coils tight in Drakken's chest, and he locks his arms in a stringent fold over it before it can begin to shake. "Well, I don't know how _to_ flirt, so there we go! But - seriously - maybe you can - can talk to somebody about that. A lady. Maybe Adrena-Lynn? She definitely knows how to show a guy she's not interested."

Drakken grins to himself. He found something semi-positive about Adrena-Lynn after all!

"Because it really does hurt a man," he finishes, "when he's made to feel like he's something special, and then he finds out he isn't."

"You _are_ something special," Amy says, her breath not even so much as hitching.

Drakken's does, into a huge knotted mass. "Really?" Some harsh mental whisper warns him not to fall for it, not to be sucked in, not to trust her. He doesn't need this again, so he narrows his eyes, ever so slightly, at her. "I mean, am I? I know you've liked a lot of guys. . ."

He words that as tactfully as he possibly can, and yet Drakken can still feel his skin speckling pink atop the blue.

DNAmy doesn't appear offended. "You were the first one to like me back," is her reply. She isn't flirting this time; she's as somber and weary as she's been ever since the end of Monkey Fist, only with a trace of hope now.

The graveyard is silent for a second - which, come to think of it, is probably the best thing for a graveyard to be.

Another nut drops on Drakken's head, and he lets out some warbled noise. It's related to a laugh, but no more closely than a second-cousin-once-removed kind of deal. "You know what I just realized?" he says.

"What?"

"You don't catch colds by standing out in the rain!" Drakken yells into the stream still pummeling his teeth. "You get them through viruses!" He doubles over, hiccups, wheezes. He wasn't able to cry at the funeral, but he's on the brink now.

Through the haze of rain and almost-tears, Drakken can see Amy tilt her head. "Why are you telling me this?" she says.

Drakken straightens and pops his back, straightening the clip-on tie Shego always called tacky. "Because I want to demonstrate my vast knowledge of science by - "

"No, no. I mean, the other things, the things about us. Why did you tell me that?"

Drakken didn't know the answer until it comes out of him:

"Because I hope we _can_ be friends. _Friends_ , because frankly I still find you rather scary. And you're not ready to have another boyfriend, and I apparently don't know anything about relationships. But you're really nice, and you make a really good cookie, and it'd be a shame if you didn't stay in my life _somehow_."

Amy's tooth-gap flashes for the briefest of instants. Drakken wobbles, relieved and shaky and drained, like he is after he throws up.

"This is just a friend thing," he says. "But as your friend, can I - may I - can I hug you? I mean, is that an acceptable thing for a friend to do?"

She nods. Drakken hunches over to fold his arms around her, and he's surprised how natural it feels.

* * *

Back at DNAmy's charming little house, the monkey ninjas have obviously behaved better for her than they _ever_ did for him. Amy scoops them up and plants kisses all over their fur, while Drakken stands in the doorway, shaking his head and grinning. They'll all be so happy together.

Before he leaves, DNAmy feeds him a warm bundle of cookies fresh from the oven. And he knows their crazy plan - _his_ crazy plan - must have helped her some after all.

Drakken savors that right along with the chocolate chips.

Over glasses of milk, they discuss whether or not it's fair for Pluto to be demoted to a dwarf planet. "Maybe it is in a category of its own, within the definition of 'planet,' but it's not fair for them to say it's not even a planet at all anymore," Drakken argues. "Just because it's the smallest! I mean, you're the smallest villain, and we never kicked you out and said you were too small to be a villain, right?"

Amy's smile is almost tentative. "Smallest _former_ villain."

Drakken's jaw narrowly misses hitting the tabletop.

"What can I say? You inspired me," DNAmy says. She's chirping again, and there appears to be a layer of happy morning dew over her eyes. "I guess that makes Dementor the new smallest villain."

"Oh, he'll _love_ to hear that!" Drakken bursts out with a guffaw.

After all, you can only be mature for so long.

That's when a small brown dog with six skinny lobster legs scuttles up to him and nudges his leg. Drakken shrinks back from the giant lobster claws attached where the front paws should be, but DNAmy laughs and hoists the creature onto her lap and coos at it.

Vintage Amy.

"I didn't know you had a dog. . . type. . . thing!" Drakken exclaims. "I have a dog, too! A poodle. His name is Commodore Puddles."

DNAmy doesn't demand to know what the heck kind of name is that, which Drakken adds to her ever-growing list of good traits. She just says, "Oh, fun!" and jiggles the dog-lobster in her lap. "He should come over and play with her sometime!"

Drakken is sure his face is lighting, florescent-bulb-style. "That'd be great for him! Oh, and don't worry. He's fixed," he adds - because, really, what would the children look like?

Yes, Drakken decides later as he's jingling the hovercraft keys in his pocket on his way to the door, it'll be quite awhile before either of them can trust someone else with their heart again. Despite that, despite the awkwardness and the leftover pain, he's glad they're going to be friends. It's just part of his new life, the one that's racked up just as many happiness-points in a week as his old supervillain one did in twenty-three years.

Drakken pauses at the doorframe, shielding his face against the rain, looking out at the still-gray sky. For an instant, it looks mournful, and he matches it. He's sad, he's so very sad for Monkey Fist, that the man never got to experience this sort of new life.

And yet it's still there, still there for him and DNAmy and anyone else who wants it. The sun is going to rise again in the morning, and Drakken wants to be there when it happens.

Okay, so technically the Western Hemisphere will revolve to face the sun again, but Drakken still wouldn't miss it for anything.

 **~Because these two deserve a shot at a really cute friendship. And Monkey Fist deserves a send-off.~**


	20. Home Away From Home

_Make sure to:_

 _*Disassemble all Doomsday devices that cannot be used for good. Or unassemble. Whatever the word is._ Check.

 _*Cover all electrical outlets._ Check. It's almost scary, how easily he's fallen into the ways of not hurting people.

 _*Transfer all furniture._ Check.

 _*Pack up your personal belongings and label the cartons._ Check.

 _*Remove all perishables from the refrigerator and freezer._ Double check. He personally consumed the last bowl of Rocky Road.

 _*Dust._ Check. That got him coughing like crazy, and it felt rather like evicting tenants who've been there as long as you have.

 _*Wacks - I mean wax - the floors._ Check. That part was more fun.

 _*Vacuum rugs._ Check.

 _*Say goodbye._

Dr. Drakken frowns down at his list, feeling as uneven inside as the ends of hair he trimmed himself last night. He rakes his hands through them now, right at the spot where they flip up-and-down over his slumping shoulders.

An evil lair is meant to be nothing more than a dwelling of absolute necessity. One you can flee at the slightest glimpse of Kim Possible or the rest of the do-gooders, even if it means playing Musical Lairs for a few days. He's gotten quite good at it. Besides, Drakken always figured he'd be ditching this old place someday - for an ornate palace, washed and waxed every day by his many servants.

Drakken shakes the notion away. It's tricky to banish those thoughts entirely, even now that the malicious intent behind them is (mostly) gone. Empires aren't built in a day, after all, so it's only logical to assume they aren't going to fold in one, either.

By that same logic, it's probably reasonable to have gotten a _little_ bit attached to his _main_ lair, where he's spent the better part of his life. (Well - okay - _let's be honest_ \- it was the _worse_ part of his life, but it was also the longer.) It's the closest thing he's had to a home since he left Mother's for college.

How many schemes he's. . . well, schemed here, how many miserable failures and near-misses at world domination! If Drakken closes his eyes for an instant, he can almost hear the heavy footsteps of his henchmen, his own voice barking orders, and Shego's sardonic replies.

Most of the memories he holds of this place aren't exactly happy, but they have a strong grip. Walking away from them is like ripping off a Band-Aid you've been wearing for three days straight.

It brightens Drakken's mood somewhat to remind himself that the building is destined to become a science museum. Still, at this point, it looks as empty and melancholy as if it's never known an owner at all.

Drakken turns now and finds himself nose-to-woodwork with the spot where his giant TV screen once stood. It, too, has been packed away and shipped off - sold, as Phase One of Operation Pay Off Credit Card Debt of Doom! Only a metal support protrudes, where Drakken guesses they'll place another security camera. It'll be weird watching _Ballroom Dancing with B-Actors_ on a screen less than six feet wide. At least he'll have the same couch and his Thinking Chair that molds to the often-achy contours of his back.

Pivoting, Drakken heads for the kitchen. The rich odor of his last peanut butter sandwich, as well as the chocolatey goodness from the accompanying cup of cocoa moo, still occupies the air. Drakken makes his way over to the refrigerator and plops against it, splaying his arms across it.

He's not _hugging_ it, technically. Just letting it brace him with its stainless steel door and its hum and the _tickety-clank_ of its ice maker. Drakken's belly gurgles with flashbacks, both the good and the (literally) painful.

When he peels himself away from the refrigerator, Drakken heads over to the sink and flips the tap on for no reason that's immediately obvious. Maybe he just needs to see it, needs to know that water is still two hydrogen atoms fused with one oxygen atom, and none of the recent changes in his life shall ever alter that.

His next stop - after turning off the tap; it's very important to retain water! - are the corridors - _hallways_ is too puny a word for their impressive vastness. After countless years of traversing them, Drakken's memorized them the way his Thinking Chair has memorized his spine. Could pace them in his sleep, and he just might have a few times.

 _Conserve_ water, that is. _Retaining_ it is. . . well, it's something else altogether.

Behind gray massive doors are his henchmen's quarters and farther off, at a lady-appropriate distance, are Shego's. Drakken doesn't step into any of them now. Although they all legally belonged to him, they weren't his territory, and it'd feel funny to enter them alone.

No, he waits and crosses into the main room. Command Central, which was once lined with monitors and beeping terminals and other assorted technology. Now, there's just one big lonely pole, surrounded by a circle of slightly-shinier flooring.

Without dopey henchmen or snarky sidekicks around, the walls seem to shrivel in on themselves. A quiver chills up Drakken's spine. Still, the pole is bared for the first time since he moved in and Drakken can't resist running a hand up and down its length.

He heads back to the corridors, instinctively hopping over a crack in the floor, even though all the tanks have been drained and will likely be filled in by the new owners. His sharks, piranhas, and giant squid all have new homes in the world's best aquariums. Drakken has already bid them farewell - with much less sappiness than when he said goodbye to the henchmen. You can't get too mushy with a tiger shark.

They gave him their phone numbers - the henchmen, not the sharks - and Drakken's already vowed he'll put them to good use. Drat the luck, he actually _misses_ the big, dumb, loyal lugs!

Now Drakken's moving deeper into the lair, past the ceiling-high rectangles with the three circles like buttons on the front of a shirt. They and the smaller, inverted triangles support both the framework of the building and the image that whoever lived here was more than just eccentric. Drakken sticks his head into a rectangle's circle and chuckles to himself - he always wanted to do that, at least once.

Drakken pokes his head inside his office/study/whatever-sounded-most-professional-at-the-time. It's the room where he built the barebone concepts of plans, held conferences with Shego, and did other assorted evil things. Now it's lined with vacant bookcases, waiting to be graced with the next generation of science manuals. Drakken's momentarily relieved that he didn't sell to someone who would pile the shelves full of romance novels or some such twaddle.

He gazes into the fireplace he'll never light again. That thing always came in handy when he needed some sinister shadows to flicker across his face - or when the chilly atmosphere of the lair left him too cold and he didn't want to admit it.

The thought brings on another chuckle, along with a head-shake, as Drakken strokes his fingers one more time over the fireplace's perimeter. He turns and walks out, the squishing noise of his boots echoing off the mammoth ceilings that always gave him an espresso-shot of ambition.

Keep walking for a few minutes, take a sharp turn to the left, then the right, and. . . there it is.

His lab.

While Drakken kept gadget-strewn tables in nearly every room of the lair, he only had one main science laboratory. He approaches it slowly now, as though he's walking on holy ground. Or at least _holey_ ground, where one wrong step and he'll be down in the prairie dog tunnels.

Drakken's fingers close around the knob like they've never touched it before. As if all those angry, desperate grabs he made for it don't count somehow. He turns it - the door opens just as easily as it always did, with that soft _skrash_ sound he loves.

Even though everything from his desk to his test tubes has already been cleared out - his chemicals got their own delightful little yellow-with-black-rays CAUTION sign - the sight of the landscape puts a rock-candy-sized wad in Drakken's throat. This was his place, and he's intimately acquainted with every inch of it.

 _There's that spot on the wall we had to refinish because Shego lasered it with our initials in a heart! That wasn't a good day. . ._

 _There's that niche in the corner where my computer used to go! I'd create fractals in my spare time. . ._

 _There's that rug they're using to cover that big chemical stain where I dumped a full beaker! The floor will always have that six-inch yellow streak. . ._

Drakken feels the warmth in his chest, not behind his eyes, and rather than congesting him, it's as runny as a soft-boiled egg. It almost hurts, lapping in his veins, and yet - and yet it's welcome. Sort of like that nip in your fingertips that tells you they're not frostbitten.

He's not sure how long he stays in there, tracing the walls and inhabiting his old stomping grounds. (Another phrase that makes no sense, because stomping too much in a chem lab could create a biohazard situation. Drakken stomped everywhere else when he was upset, but not here.) It could be hours before he's able to yank his not-ready-yet self back out the door, click it behind him, and take a lung-swelling breath.

At the end of the corridor is his bedroom.

Drakken doesn't even get that sad twinge when he pokes his head in and looks around. It's as if it's a wholly different place than the one where he used to sleep and play with his Gameboy and hang himself over the side of his wonderful bed as he wracked his brain for evil plans.

The windows are no longer blacked out, for one thing. The shades have been taken down, and a gold-and-pink sunset spills through the panes, lighting the emptiness, softening the intimidating shade of maroon Drakken selected decades ago.

He's never seen it in the sunlight before.

No matter how many times he tells himself, _I used to live here_ , Drakken's feelings can't wrap around the reality. But - _gosh_ , is it beautiful.

Drakken stops just below the window and sinks into the middle of the square-shaped shadow stamped on the floor. This is the warmest the lair has ever been. And yet he's broken out in three different sets of goose bumps - one on each leg, and one on his neck.

The very last stop is the Lookout Point at the very top of the lair's considerable height. From here, Drakken can gaze out over the ocean and recall how he used to pretend it was his domain. The picture of himself as Supreme World Ruler was clear as glass back then; now it's comfortably murky, and will probably only get dimmer.

Drakken doesn't allow himself to be wistful for long, though. He has a nearing, ever-brightening future to concentrate on, after all.

Global Justice. A home that won't be under raid by the authorities pretty much ever again. Shego as a three-blocks-over neighbor. A nice big, open span of himself where hate used to be - now he can do whatever he wants to remodel it.

 _If I stayed here,_ Drakken thinks toward the bottom of the staircase, _would I ever escape it?_

There's no _scientific_ reason why he couldn't, Drakken reasons as he retraces his path back down the corridor. But that'll always be the bedroom where he woke up from hideous nightmares, the lab where he turned himself blue, the office where Hank Perkins dissolved their partnership, the Command Central where he had so many fights with Shego. . .

Each room he passes deletes a junk file from the little hard drive in his heart. By the time he reaches the front door, Drakken's sure his CPU is purring away - a sign of happiness from computers as well as cats.

"Goodbye," Drakken whispers in the doorway, even though the building doesn't have ears, and the security cameras lack the cerebral skills needed to comprehend what he's saying. If you've lived in a place for over twenty years, you've pretty much earned at least _one_ instance of talking to it like it can hear you.

Sort of like the rules for Dibs.

And now he's ready to confront the rest of his life. No, _confront_ sounds so hostile. He doesn't want his world to be a battleground anymore. He's had enough of that.

Drakken takes another bittersweet look back over his shoulder and snaps off the light switch one final time. He and his old lair have both found their destinies. Now it's time they part ways.

* * *

Summer's winding down now, not in full force temperatures, the kind they get in August. It's warm, with pleasant breezes and cooler nights that still smell like honeysuckle. Ah, give him June temperatures any day!

The only problem then was the bees. They don't look menacing, all chubby and covered with fuzz, but their sting hurts like the dickens. You can stay away from them as long as they don't mistake you for a flower - which would be a good plan, except Drakken still can't fully control when petals poof out of his neck.

Even a falcon with twenty/twenty vision could mistake him for a flower at that point. He mistakes _himself_ for a flower when it happens overnight and he's gazing in the mirror first thing in the morning.

Drakken waves an arm through the air now just in case there are any renegades still hanging around as he swoops down over the Middleton neighborhood that is now his home again. Many of the houses still sport missing shingles or cut-down stumps where actual live trees once grew before the alien invasion. The house where Kim Possible used to live has been replaced by the mere wooden skeleton of a new dwelling.

Something pings in Drakken then - not quite sadness, but something in the same genus. The whole family was always seemingly immune to suffering, as if James Possible himself had rigged a force field around them. And then, the night of the World-Saving Event, they lost everything - a reversal of fortune Drakken can't even bring himself to delight in.

At least the varying degrees of damage make it easier to tell the houses apart. Drakken's one complaint about his new street is that all the houses are faintly cookie-cutter; the only way to distinguish the one he bought is the SOLD sign in front. He'll have to do something to help it stand out in the boxy, peachy-tan crowd.

Nevertheless, it is his, all his, and pride bubbles in Drakken as he parks the hovercraft on the driveway.

The real-estate lady hurries up to him, her fingers wringing each other out the way the henchmen's used to do when they had to report they'd failed. Drakken tries to concentrate on her, but his eyes insist on scanning his surroundings, wanting to understand the utter lack of moving vans.

"I'm terribly sorry, Dr. Drakken," Ms. Real Estate says. "We have a slight mix-up."

The bottom falls out of Drakken's stomach, dropping his dinner into his legs. "Meaning. . .?"

"Meaning the original owners of the house have one more night. You can't move in until tomorrow."

Great. He's gone from being a ruthless villain to being a roofless ex-villain.

Drakken drops to his knees on the sidewalk, still split in patches, and thrusts his hands skyward. "I'm homeless for a night?! Am I doomed to wander the streets, alone and desolate?" He stands up because the gravel is stinging him even through his lab coat and puts a finger to his chin in thought. "I suppose I could stay with one of the henchmen. But they snore."

Ms. Real Estate looks at Drakken as if he's a talking, blue chicken who can't find a place to roost. "No, nothing like that, Dr. Drakken. We've put you up in a hotel room for the night. All expenses paid, of course."

"Oh, hot dog!" Drakken exclaims, even though it's not _contemporary_ teen slang. He's just always had a soft spot for hotels - free tiny samples of shampoo, clean sheets, more cable channels. "I mean. . . thank you?" he offers.

"You're welcome." Ms. Real Estate extends her arm for a handshake, which Drakken accepts after taking a moment to coach himself through it. Sometimes (okay, _most_ of the time) his nervous system can be very particular about being touched.

It helps that her hands are almost as little as his are, and Drakken marvels at the near-perfect symmetry that can fit human hands together.

That bright wonder has been fully operational ever since the World-Saving Event, and it doesn't dial down any once he sees the hotel.

The Middleton SnuggleInn appears small for its medium size - Drakken can relate - and entirely unassuming. And yet there's something welcoming about it, something that clearly conveys this isn't a place where the shadows dominate and the reminders of old evil plots lurk around every corner. Maybe it's the kiddy play area jutting out from the ground floor, or the sharp, familiar scent of chlorine in all its chemical goodness.

Or what fun it is to hold out your arms and imagine you're a Jedi as the automatic doors part for you and bustle you into the fresh, airy reception area.

Drakken hops up to the front desk and finds, to his delight, that he's actually at the front of the line! A few other people are straggling in behind him, their bronzed forms suggesting they've spent the whole afternoon tanning by the outdoor pool.

Tanning's actually really unhealthy. Drakken's got his lips halfway apart to tell them that when a friendly-looking potted plant taller than he is snags his attention.

He turns and nods at it. _Hello,_ he addresses it in the wordless language of all things plant. _My name is Dr. Drakken._

 _Welcome, Dr. Drakken,_ the plant says - happily, from what Drakken can detect. _I hope you enjoy your stay._

 _I already am_ , Drakken says.

Not a lie, either. This hotel isn't the Ritzy-Carlson or whatever that one place is called, but. . .

It's nice, Drakken decides. Nice to walk across the carpet, which isn't real velvet but squishes delightfully under his boots anyway. Nice to gaze up at the chandelier that's a little dusty and yet still sparkles magical reflections. Nice to book a room with a clerk who isn't glowering while Drakken digs his ID from the impish hideaway seams in his pockets.

In fact, she smiles with kind eyes, eyes that recognize him as the man who saved the world. Reverence doesn't pour from them, but there's respect there.

That's good enough.

"Ah, yes, Dr. Drakken," the clerk says, tapping at her keyboard. "Yes, a room was booked for you this morning. Number 257. Here's your key card."

Drakken swallows back the _Oh, goody!_ rising inside him and adopts a more professional tone. "Much obliged, ma'am."

Key card in hand, he strolls to the shiny-inside elevator with his arms swinging casually, presses the "2nd floor" button only once and with calm fingers, rides it all the way up there, pads down more carpeted halls, locates Room 257, inserts the key card, waits for it to give the all-clear green light, and swings himself inside.

 _Then_ he hops up and down and squeals.

Oooh, this is wonderful! The little individually wrapped bars of soap sitting pristinely on the sink, the compact hair dryer plugged into the wall. . . even the trash cans are fringed with decorative pom-poms, and it thrills Drakken, buzzing in his center.

Drakken crosses over to the window that takes up almost an entire wall and sweeps back the curtain. It faces the parking lot and the sound of faraway traffic.

It is a fine place - "fine" in the old-fashioned sense of the world, where it means something closer to "wonderful" than "all right." Queen-sized bed which, while still not as big as his own, is blanketed in a pleasant shade of navy that makes Drakken feel at home right away. TV cabinet across from the bed. Air conditioner humming, still necessary in the middle of September. Table by the window. A door that automatically locks shut behind him.

That last bit provides Drakken with an additional dose of security, as does the warm incandescent glow of the double-lamp when he switches it on, and the knowledge that he's done nothing in the past three months to invoke the wrath of the police.

He bounces up and down on the bed - just on his knees so he doesn't knock his head against the ceiling - his mind churning like an old-fashioned mill. Let's see, should he raid the mini-fridge first or check how many channels he gets on his personal little TV - or play with the hairdryer? Or sneak down to the pool? _Oooh_ , the possibilities are infinite!

Drakken rolls over onto one side and smacks his bright-blue overnight bag with his elbow. It _thwump_ s to the floor.

 _Splendid idea! First thing I should do is get settled in!_

Drakken places his toothpaste and his stick of deodorant on the bathroom sink, carefully arranging his toothbrush in the complimentary holder so that none of its bristles touch a potential germ source. Pajamas get spread out on the bed, Sir Fuzzymuffin the Second resting on top to guard them. His mad-scientist logbook goes on the nightstand, next to the pad of paper and the pen thoughtfully provided.

Okay. _Now_ it's time to raid the mini-fridge.

Or at least it's time to startle a slip of paper from atop the mini-fridge and send it drifting down between his feet. Drakken bends down to pick it up, grimacing as his back hitches. When he gets himself upright again and reads the note, he grimaces again.

 _Please note: You WILL be billed for any item in the mini-fridge you eat._

And below that are a list of the contents and their respective prices.

"Gnngh!" Drakken's fists tense until he hears Ms. Real Estate's voice in his head: _All expenses paid, of course._

Heh. It won't be going on _his_ tab.

Drakken stops with his hand halfway to the fridge handle, though, and shifts his weight from foot to foot. He doesn't have to see himself in the mirror to know that a grin is slashing across his lips, a wicked little gleam spangling his pupils. He's felt it on his face on so many occasions - so many occasions that led to his failure, his arrest, his despair.

If he _were_ paying for it himself, it wouldn't be selfish to pig out on everything in the mini-fridge. But since he isn't - and since he actually has a semi-functional conscience now -

Drakken pokes a finger at the cheapest item on the list. A granola bar, that one brand that always tastes like burned leaves. He feels his mouth coil up.

All right, maybe it's unselfish enough to eat the _second_ -cheapest item on the list - a small bag of cookies for just fifteen cents more.

And since this is basically a gift, Drakken takes the time to slow down and appreciate them instead of scarfing them in one bite each. Every crunch is that much more satisfying.

Also, because the waiting-for-an-hour-before-you-swim thing is just an old wives' tale - no offense to old wives; they're perfectly nice - Drakken chooses to go swimming next. There's a nice pair of shorts and a T-shirt in his overnight bag that look fairly waterproof, the next best thing to the swimsuit that's in a cardboard box on a moving van somewhere.

The one-piece swimsuit proclaiming him a "Formerly Evil Genius," the first word written by Drakken himself in non-washable marker. Though Shego's dubbed it his "nerd suit," it's the only type of suit he's ever been comfortable in. Leave the Speedos to the Senor Senior, Juniors of the world; Drakken has long since learned that the less sky-colored skin bared, the better.

 _And who knows?_ Drakken thinks, selecting a towel from under the sink and rubbing it against his cheek to test its fluffiness. _This might be a way to meet some new people._

He wants that, he'll admit. Even as badly as other people annoy him at times - okay, _often_ \- there is something so good about the presence of another understanding person, a friendly word or a hand of assistance, that helps banish the loneliness he wallowed in as a villain. Dr. Klein, Drakken's new psychiatrist, says that a desperate need for companionship isn't a weakness - it's just humanity.

Villains weren't supposed to show either.

And after the incident with the - _shudder_ \- Diablos and the - _urgh_ \- team-up with Warmonga, Drakken's going to take all the humanity he can get.

* * *

Drakken skips his way off the elevator, down the hall, and up to the pool doors, where he spreads his arms Jedi-style again. Except this time, when he walks forward, his nose crunches straight into the plastic NO RUNNING sign, and would've dragged the rest of him with it if he hadn't planted his hands on the doorframe in time.

Okay, that's embarrassing.

 _You still have much to learn, my young apprentice,_ says the little Obi-Wan in his head.

That. . . or _this_ door isn't automatic.

The _other_ sign - PUSH - makes the answer immediately obvious. Drakken grins sheepishly, even though his peripheral vision reports no bystanders. One shoulder-shove at the door, and it swings open.

Drakken's bare soles squish and slap against the puddle-flooded concrete. The odor - chlorine mixed with pH and other assorted chemicals - twitches in his still-stinging nostrils and makes it impossible to _stop_ grinning. Drakken finds a bench to park his room towel on, glancing this way and that for potential tower-snatchers. The only ones in sight are an older couple dangling their feet over in the deep end. They don't look the criminal type, but stranger things have happened - especially to him - so Drakken tosses a security force field on top of his towel just in case.

Restraining his legs to a walk - even though there's no sign that explicitly _says_ NO SKIPPING - Drakken eases onto the first step in the shallow end. Then the second, the third, the fourth, the last. The initial chill around his calves adjusts to comfortable levels as he submerges up to his ankles, his knees, slowly approaching the section whose safety-inspection-approved diving boards broadcast its insane, gaping depth.

He's a decent-enough swimmer in over-the-head levels, but he has to work up to it. Most pools go four feet, five feet, and then have a terrifying drop out of nowhere - your head dunks underwater, and you're too discombobulated to discern where the surface is and how to flail back up to it. Drowning is more embarrassing than whacking your face against the door.

Also, it kills you.

From the four-foot depth that hardly dampens the bottom of his T-shirt, Drakken peers down at his legs and extends one like he's seen ballerinas do on TV. They always seem longer and looser underwater - especially this sort of water, clearer than a spit-shined windshield. More graceful. . .

. . . although Drakken's feet still tangle in the pool drain and send him sprawling against the teal-tiled wall, which he grabs just in time to protect himself from a chin-collision.

A squiggling jet presses itself against Drakken's palms. It tickles worse than a leaking feather pillow, so Drakken's already chuckling when he leans down and is even more giddy to see one of those plunger-ish holes stuck into the pool's side.

Drakken squints at it for a moment, contemplating its purpose. Is it there to stabilize the water pressure? Regulate the temperature?

Surely it wasn't installed for someone to slap their hands over it and treat themselves to a ticklish massage, but Drakken goes ahead and does so anyway. After all, he's saved the world, sold his lair, joined Global Justice, _and_ only added seventy-five cents to the real estate's room charge; he's earned a good goof-off, hasn't he?

"Hey, mister," a small voice lisps.

Drakken jerks around to see a kid of - oh, he can't tell - six, maybe seven? Only his snorkeled head peeks out from the water in a way reminiscent of those photos people have supposedly taken of the Loch Ness Monster. Below the surface, his skinny body and stretched-out green flippers further enhance the effect.

"What're you doing?" the kid continues.

Groan. Great. No doubt this child's a lifeguard-in-training and has come to lecture him on not obstructing. . . whatever that stream is for. Drakken doesn't know how to talk to kids, either - scientific explanations and chemical analogies pull very little weight with the baby-teeth crowd.

And just like that, he's no longer a Jedi; he's a Storm Trooper, and he knows every single word he fires will miss.

"Nothing!" Drakken bursts out. "Well - that's not quite true - something! I was playing. . . err, checking these little knobs over here. You see, if you put your hand over it, it feels really awesome, and when you take your hand away, all the water comes spewing out. That's because when you interrupt the flow, the pressure builds. . ."

The kid's eyes have stopped listening, but he isn't preparing to unleash The Rules of Safe Swimming either. "Cool!" he cries, bolting to the hole. His hands - even littler than Drakken's - cover it, wobble around with his giggling, and then jump back to let the spray. . . err, spray.

"I'm Nate," the kid finally says.

"Oh." On the brilliant train that forms Drakken's thoughts, social skills are the caboose, but its rusty wheels churn up a sufficient reply. "Nice to meet you. I'm Dr. Drakken."

Nate nods, almost as if that's what he were expecting to hear. It's harder to shock a first-grader than an adult with a mind already set like cement, Drakken hypothesizes. "If we're gonna play, it hasta be over here. I'm not allowed over _there_ ," he says, poking a finger toward the diving boards.

"Me neither."

 _That_ does stymie the kid. "Whaddya mean, you're not allowed? You can do whatever you want - you're a big person!"

"Well -" Drakken pretends to modestly examine a bicep, which doesn't look as breakable as it did even ten minutes before - "I mean, I don't allow myself over there. I'm not a fabulous swimmer, just between you and me."

"Really?" Nate says. "But swimming's easy!"

"I _do_ know how to doggy-paddle," Drakken adds. A sample of defensiveness contaminates his words like residue someone forgot to wash out of a beaker.

If Nate catches it, it doesn't budge his smile a centimeter. "What about the others? Can you do the backstroke?"

 _Can I do_ anything _involving the back?_ is the real question.

"I assume I have to be on my back," Drakken says. (All right, so it's not the brilliantest thing to ever leave his lips.)

"Yup. Go ahead. Lie down."

He sounds so knowledgeable for such a young thing that Drakken does, sighing right out loud as the water loosens every joint that always felt screwed in just a tad too tightly. Nate doesn't miss a beat with his next instruction: "Now flop your arm back."

No problem there. Drakken's arms are rejoicing in the opportunity to flop and have that actually be the right move to make. It's just when Drakken's midsection starts to fold itself under the water that he throws a panicked glance to Nate. "Now what?"

"Do the other arm!"

Drakken obeys, slapping up a spurt of water that rains down back down on his face. "Now the first arm?" he guesses.

"Yeah!"

And so that's how he goes, alternating arms, panting and puffing. Drakken can feel his body wandering and infers he isn't following a perfect trajectory, a fact he can't spare a neuron to focus on. After what could be eons, one pulled-back hand crashes against something hard, and the pain dissipates as Drakken realizes it's the opposite wall.

"I did it!" he cries, feet tingling from the toes up as he situates them on the bottom again.

Nate whoops from beside him, and it can't have been eons after all, unless this kid just doesn't age. "Pretty good," he says, almost slyly. "Wanna race?"

A familiar knot cinches in Drakken's chest. No, he does not "wanna race." He'll lose - come in last - not win, and then he'll have to look upon this child's smug face and act happy for him. And while he no longer despises Kim Possible, Drakken's still no fan of losing to children.

"Eerrgh - no, not really," Drakken says. "I don't think a pro is supposed to race a beginner, anyway. It's a rule, an official swimming rule. Like at the Olympics. Maybe."

Okay, so now he's bluffing, but it beats the _tar_ out of the alternative.

Nate accepts this with a shrug, still smiling through his snorkel. "Okay - can you touch the bottom?"

"Doing it right now."

"No-wah!" Nate lets out another giggle he's too new to be self-conscious about. "I meant, with your _hand_."

"Oh. Going under. Of course." Drakken pauses in wringing out his collar. Well, why not? He left his contacts back in his room and shook his hair from its tie before he even came down here - so what's the harm in getting a little wetter?

Drakken pinches his nose shut with one hand and plunges his head beneath the water before he can lose his moxie (that isn't a new expression for throwing up, no matter how it sounds; it just means he'll chicken out). His eyes squint almost flat, blocking all but the thinnest of light. With his other hand, he fights for the pool floor and after another second - it lasts a year and yet it can't have been a year because he's still holding his breath - his fingers smack down on tile.

A thrill cavorts up Drakken's arm and through the rest of him like an electrical short, only not deadly like the real thing would be under these circumstances. He releases himself.

Water buoyancy counterbalances gravity, and he's able to bob back up to the surface.

Drakken's spikes of hair have adhered to his forehead in uneven rows, dripping streams of water into his eyebrow. But he's beaming from one ringing ear to another. "Mission. . . accomplished," he pants.

"That was wicked!" Nate cries. Drakken cringes, wishing the kid could've used a different word (though he much appreciates the sentiment). "See, you gotta be able to do that if you're gonna go to the Olympics. . . if you're gonna win a gold medal."

"I already did," Drakken says. He props himself against the wall and lets that statement float atop the water. Even after three months, it still hasn't sunk in. Tonight doesn't change that.

All he's aware of is the promise that someday soon, he might manage to lose a race and not mind.

* * *

Dr. Drakken, serious student of all fields of science, has forgotten one very basic scientific fact: As soon as you exit a hot tub, any formerly-temperate room will instantly become as frigid as Pluto.

All right, so maybe he's exaggerating a bit, Drakken admits as he deactivates his security field with shaky fingers and wraps his towel around his stiff body. Maybe the cold is only Neptune-level.

The elderly foot-danglers turned out to be Nate's grandparents, and they came to collect him at nine o'clock sharp. Already _waaay_ past his bedtime. Drakken was both regretful and relieved to see the kid go.

He's still treading water in more than one sense here.

And even though the last rays of sun are being swallowed by twilight shadows, Drakken couldn't bring himself to go to bed yet. He was too energized, too wired-by-uncertainty- so he slipped into the hot tub, whose jet streams flicker on and off and are pure heaven on his lower vertebrae.

The only downside is how shockingly inferior the world you emerge into feels. As depressing and trashy as the villain life looked when viewed from the UN's stage.

Drakken slips back to his room just long enough to blow-dry his clothes and then returns to check out the hotel nightlife.

There's not much. The miniature golf course - _putt-putt_ is too demeaning a term - has already shut down. Too bad, as Drakken much prefers miniature golf to regular golf. He's no better at it, but at least it has interesting obstacles - castles, tunnels, Frankenstein on one hole - as opposed to plain old sand and water traps. What Killigan sees in those is beyond Drakken. Plus, you get to pick which color golf ball you want, so it can be more easily found and even coordinate with your outfit!

If you're into that type of thing.

The hotel bar is still open. Drakken is sorely tempted to slouch himself on a stool and growl, "Hit me," through a tough-guy-curled mouth straight out of a movie, except he doesn't know if that's a phrase people still use. And what with how the bartender's arm muscles bulge like he just got double-tetanus shots, that misunderstanding could be more than a little painful.

Besides, Drakken's seen enough of those same movies to gather that bars can get pretty rowdy after dark.

Right up near the reception area, though, hangs a poster that announces "FREE DVD Rental Friday for paid guests."

 _Free_. It's one of Drakken's favorite words, along with _chemistry_ , _indeed_ , _pumpernickel_ , and _behold_ (with eight or nine "o"s and an exclamation point at the end). It indicates both a lack of payment required and a lack of bars on your windows.

Of course he's going to rent a video - well, one of those newfangled "DVD" things.

Drakken sprints past romantic comedies ("rom-coms" to the hip) and sidesteps the spy movies whose covers boast Doomsday devices he once would've been proud to call his own on his way to the Disney Classics section. There's something still lost inside him, something quivering as it nears uncharted territory, and only something from his childhood can soothe it tonight.

 _Bambi_? No. There's not enough Kleenex in the whole hotel.

 _Cinderella_? Eh - never his favorite.

 _The Jungle Book_! Now if there's anybody who understands what it is to bounce from home to home, it's that kid. What's his name, anyway?

 _Mugwump? Meow? Ron Stoppable?_

 _No, wait. That's somebody else. . ._

Whatever his name is, he's Drakken's soul mate for the next two hours.

* * *

 _Mowgli._

The kid's name is _Mowgli_. And as the last frame of the movie fades from the screen, Drakken has to concede that at least his own nomadic experience doesn't involve being stalked by a tiger who has every intention of eating him.

Still, the room seems to be growing more and more cramped by the minute. The polar opposite of his old lair, whose wide, shined floors were perfectly designed for the pacing of a troubled mad scientist. And while Drakken's not nearly as troubled as he was even a few months ago, all his problems haven't _poof_ ed away.

That'd be magic, and serious scientists don't believe in magic.

Drakken bounds across the bed restlessly on his knees and surveys the painting hanging on the wall behind it. It's not a painting _of_ anything in particular, yet it's not an abstract, either. After a thorough study, Drakken determines it's done in the style known as _cubism_ , which Drakken can appreciate, because it's geometry. In pretty colors!

His insides, now, those are more of an abstract, a jumble of assorted shapes, lines, and hues; a pattern here and there, but nothing concrete to go on.

Boy, he underestimated what nice company that Nate child made. With him gone and the parking-lot lights having long since winked on outside the curtains, Drakken's newfound isolation is crushing.

And he's still not used to being on the right side of the law. For the last twenty minutes, he's been perched on the edge of the bed like a raven, readying for flight should the phone ring warningly or the police begin to pound on the door.

Except no one would ever arrest a raven. Well, maybe that one creepy one in the poem they had to read for high school Literature. . .

Drakken grasps both temples to keep them from whirling away. This is exactly how he used to feel back in the old days - well, about four months ago - when Shego left for home and the henchmen went to bed and he didn't have a scheme to concentrate his thoughts on. Left alone with his thoughts and that ever-present itch under his skin that even Private What's-His-Name commented on. . .

He doesn't know what to do. The only way he's ever coped with this feeling is by attempted-conquest-via-doom-ray.

That's not an option anymore.

But who's to say it can't happen again? When he's alone in the middle of the night, can evil sneak back and whisper hypnotically in his ear, a la Kaa the Snake - only even scarier, because Drakken's never really been that afraid of snakes? Plus, his voice actor was Winnie the Pooh's voice actor, too, and who could be afraid of that silly ol' bear?

 _Okay - time to get a grip._

Drakken nods at himself, gathers his remaining supply of sanity, and glances at the phone. His first instinct is to call Mother. Her cooing can always chase any nastiness right out of him.

But she's in bed by now. Ten o'clock, every night, reliable as Big Ben - which, Drakken remembers reading somewhere, is the most accurate clock in the world, never off by more than a millionth of a second at a time. And her solutions tend to be somewhat pat, not something worth waking her up for.

Shego, on the other hand, now she's more of a night person. . .

His hand wavers over the phone. Now that he and Shego are "pals," to use her own words, will she still skin him alive if he calls her in the middle of the night after a bad dream?

Maybe he better call her _now_ just to be on the safe side.

Drakken's fingers twiddle in his lap. And maybe the bigger question is, will she _understand_? Her concept of home and family is even shakier than his, and Drakken's not sure if loneliness is something she can even feel.

Then again, if there's one thing Shego is, it's as multifaceted as the diamond he stole once for Operation Catastrophic Doom.

And he's not sure he said that right. Can you really say _if there's one thing a person is, it's many things_?

Well, the worst she can do is hang up on him. He can chalk that up to a learning experience.

That speaks brightly and soundlessly from his clear place - the place that helped him save the world, a place similar to but separate from the leafy layers of plant communication.

Drakken pokes out Shego's new number and waits with his heart thudding. If only he had the medal to clutch - not that it's a talisman or anything. Just a tangible representation of his accomplishments.

"Hello?" says a woman on the other end. "Dr. D?" She sounds tired, but not like she's lining up for target practice. And she knows it's him, even though he's using the hotel phone. Drakken finds that strangely touching.

He perches on the edge of the mattress, which doesn't quite give properly. Without his big red bed, which is safe when nothing else in the world is safe, he feels like one of those old take-it-apart-and-put-it-back-together-again toy dogs.

Yes, that's exactly it. Drakken nods - for his own sake, since even Shego can't see through phone lines. "Shego? I feel modular," he says.

"Yeah, that woulda been my first guess," Shego says. Her voice is toneless with sarcasm. Liquids bubbling in Bunsen burners couldn't be a more welcome sound.

"No, seriously, Shego! It's lonely here. Can we just. . . talk for a few minutes?" The _talk_ cracks as though he's fifteen, and Drakken's grateful she also can't see his blotching cheeks.

Brief silence.

"Well, yeah, I guess," Shego says at last. Drakken can imagine her pulling her legs up into the chair with her and rearranging them into their neat bow.

"Oh, thank you!" comes out of Drakken in a great gust. "You see, I thought I'd call you now, since my chances of getting hung up on increase exponentially with every hour after midnight. But if I had a bad dream in the middle of the night, I'd still need you. BUT if I call now, I can talk to you first and maybe have no nightmares at all, so it's a win-win scenario, which we should all try to achieve in -"

"Beep-beep-beep. And we are live on the ground, and we have made an actual nerd sighting."

That's not an insult, not quite. Not laced as it is with laughter that seems to reach through the phone line and give his arm a playful squeeze instead of landing an elbow to his gut.

"I guess. . . I guess it just finally hit me there's no going back now," Drakken says. He twirls the phone cord between his fingers, a luxury not afforded by a cell phone. "That I've changed everything. Did you feel like that - did you _ever_ feel like that?"

Partway through that sentence, he chomps his tongue to keep from asking the specific, the obvious one: Shego standing on his front porch, still young enough to be completing her teaching degree, running from the superhero team whose jumpsuit she still wore. _That_ 'd get him hung up on a flash.

Drakken can't tell if Shego caught it or not, because she says, "Yeah, felt like that a couple of times," as if they're discussing which take-out place to order from. "But it goes away pretty fast if you're into what you're doing."

"And you think I'm _into_ reforming?" Drakken asks.

"Are you kidding?" Shego snorts lightly. "You haven't shut up about it for three months. 'Now that I'm a good guy. . .' blah-blah-blah."

Drakken remembers not to nod this time. "Yes, I suppose you're right. But what if I can't do it? What if I'm. . . bad at it?" His pitch slides up and down as if it's on a yo-yo string.

"Uh, Doc. Have you _noticed_ that, like, the only things you've ever done right in your life were good things?"

For an instant, Drakken's reminded of Professor Dementor's shrill Germanness, zinging him with the same thing. He resists the urge to scowl, though it isn't easy. "I - I have, now that you mention it. I'm just a little - err, apprehensive about moving. It's been so long since I lived in a _house_."

"Just mow the lawn and don't blast rock music at 3 AM and you'll be fine," Shego says. She's still flat, level, calm. It soothes the hairs on the back of Drakken's prickled neck. "And don't even get started doubting Global Justice, 'kay? That Dr. Director is one obnoxiously smart lady. If she wants you, you're golden."

Drakken feels his breath sigh out of a knot. "Thank you, Shego. You're a good friend."

There's the type of pause where, if it were anyone other than Shego, Drakken would assume they were blinking in disbelief.

"Well, you're welcome," she finally says. Her words soften for a moment before jumping back into flippancy again. "Now - could _you_ be a good friend and lemme get to bed?"

She asked. She didn't just hang up.

The heat pocket in Drakken's chest could have come straight out of the hot tub. He forgets common sense and this time he nods, about twelve times, against the receiver, until the little sound-holes tickle against his ear. "Yes, Shego. I can do that. Oh - the hotel is marvelous, but I'll wait until tomorrow to tell you!" he says, suddenly overwhelmed by the desire to help her in any way he can and for her to recognize his sacrifice. "Good night."

"'Night," Shego says, still with a smile in her voice.

Drakken hangs up before he can hear the lonesome groan of the dial tone. And he smiles, too.

Good and relaxed now, Drakken reaches for the remote and clicks on the TV. The sound rushes at him without delay, and he frantically dials the volume down to a half-decibel above mute - his now-plant-sensitive hearing will still be able to hear it, and with any luck, the rest of the hotel's guests _won't_.

It's foreign, them mattering to him, but it bodes well for where he's headed.

No, life isn't going to be automatically perfect now that he's a superhero. But sprawled on a mattress almost as comfy as his own, with old cartoons blaring in front of him and the exhilarating smell of pool-chlorine in the background - for the first time in a long time, Drakken doesn't have any complaints.

Soon his eyelids begin to sag shut, and Drakken has to coax himself through the tooth-brushing and the pajama-donning before they completely clock off for the night. His candle tended to burn at all ends (which, technically, can't happen since only one end has a wick, although perhaps that's the point of the expression), so making it to an actual bed has always been hit-or-miss.

Ah, yes. The bed. It's not as luscious as the enormous red one that's all his, but now that he's fallen into inertia, he has to admit it feels pretty good.

In the darkness, that chemical cocktail of frustration, fear, and loneliness hasn't strayed far from his nerves. He'll be old and gray (well, old and blue with gray hair) before he forgets the blast of the Diablos' laser arms. They're still hissing somewhere nearby that they will find him again, hissing threats that will no doubt steal into his mind and spoil many a night of sleep.

But they need his permission to destroy his life again, and that Drakken will deny until the day he loses his hair completely.

If he ever does. Drakken briefly tries to imagine whether or not his father is balding by now before remembering that doesn't affect him at all. Baldness is passed down through the genes of your maternal grandmother - a man Drakken has no memory of, period.

Drakken snuggles down under the crisp-washed sheets and sighs into his pillow, the freshly laundered one that's never held the fidgeting of a sweat-drenched ponytail. The air warms his nose and comes back to him. Soft and safe.

Just what he's always wanted.

For a few decades, he thought he wanted something else, but he was as wrong as a genius could be.

* * *

"Here you are, Dr. Drakken." Ms. Real Estate forks over the key the way teachers hand back tests stickered for great work. "It's all yours."

A grateful, gravelly noise happens in Drakken's throat, and he loops the chain around his fingers. Its coppery surface looks dainty and dwarfish even in _his_ grip, and yet he's as awestruck by the sight of it as he was by his first Spinning Top of Doom so many years ago.

Drakken rolls back his shoulders, strides up the driveway in the manner befitting a law-abiding homeowner. Ooh, there's even a little doggy door for Commodore Puddles (who's been boarding with Mother to spare him the stress of the move)! The person-door comes open with minimal sticking when he slips - well, fumbles - the key into the lock. And then. . .

. . . there it is. All his. Drakken half expects confetti to rain down to the blare of trumpets when he steps over the threshold.

It doesn't, of course. There's just an unshakable feeling of differentness, as if he's stepped through a portal into an alternate dimension.

A grin plumps Drakken's cheeks right up to where he can see them.

The most vital of his belongings - his Thinking Chair, his desk, his matchless bed, his chemistry set - are brought in first. Drakken doesn't exactly have your traditional moving crew; their fees were _far_ outside his new budget. But what are hulking former henchmen for, anyway?

Drakken barks out orders from his plastered-to-the-wall ninja-position as they cart in the kitchen table, which doesn't so much as graze him. (There are times when it pays to have such little musculature.) The henchmen, being the henchmen, drop couches and such on their toes a few times, but that's okay, because Drakken's learned from experience that his henchmen aren't the types to file an on-the-job injury lawsuit.

Oh. . . and also because they aren't seriously harmed.

(Still getting used to that.)

Once almost everything has been piled in and the henchmen are free to leave, Drakken plops down into his Thinking Chair with an enormous sigh. It's lost none of its familiar folds, nor that little dent his backside carved.

And the living room doesn't look as bland as Drakken feared. His dark furniture adds some vibrancy to the commonplace white walls, which themselves deepen and enrich the brown of his Thinking Chair.

Drakken approves, even though he's not an interior decorator. No, he's a superhero, which is probably a much higher calling. Not to dismiss interior decorators, because they came in really handy when he was picking out new curtains. . .

As comfy as this chair is, exploring always wins out over sitting still. Drakken charges into the kitchen - which, unlike his old one, has windows, as though it belongs to a man unashamed of the fact that his body needs to refuel every few hours. On the other side of the kitchen is the more formal dining room, and _its_ walls are scarcely any brighter than ash. Drakken frowns. He'll have to fix that right away.

That room curves around and comes back to meet the hallway, which Drakken creeps down, planting his feet as cautiously an astronaut adjusting to zero-gravity. It hits him that he doesn't know where he's going yet. He knew every dark, menacing curve of his lair's hallway by heart. This new one is precisely straight, so it shouldn't be hard to memorize. Still, he has a momentary longing for what used to be.

It doesn't last long. Nothing about this new house screams, "KEEP OUT - HAUNTED." Of course, his lair wasn't _really_ haunted, either - he was merely playing on the general public's superstitions to keep them out of his hair. But it was stockpiled with guilt up to the ceilings, and you could never be sure when it would tip over on you while you were attempting to eat a bowl of cereal or sing along with the Oh Boyz.

Drakken pokes into the bathroom and does an appreciative once-over - it will never be this spic-and-span again; it's practically a law of nature. The faucet shines with his reflection, happier and less drawn, and the shower door has been scrubbed to gleaming perfection. He flushes the toilet, just to make certain the plumbing still works. Its gurgle is shorter and blunter than the one at his old lair, probably because it's less distant from sea level.

A few empty guest rooms stand ready and waiting, carpets freshly vacuumed. Drakken does spend a couple of minutes in each, yelling, "Dr. Drakken is awesome!" just so it'll echo back to him in tenfold. (Got to take advantage of those pseudo-caverns while you can, after all.)

It is _his_ bedroom, however, that Drakken is nervous to walk into, though he couldn't name the reason. His emotions are cinching in his belly, each one indistinguishable from the others.

The clear place gives only silent encouragement.

Drakken breathes deep, so deep it coughs back out, and turns the doorknob. With a gentle squeak, the room is unveiled.

It's. . . nice. Not as roomy as his old one - although what could be? - but with ceilings that satisfy his claustrophobia and a solid floor untouched by shark tanks. Painted off-white, not quite gray, its corners were made for a bed to wedge into. And with the sunlight bathing every cubic inch, it seems to be inviting him to cartwheel across it.

Drakken tries, falls, springs back to his feet prematurely and stumbles into a wall. His chest thumps into a golden spurt of sun, which catches the glimmer on his T-shirt precisely. Not blasting back into his eyes and blinding him - just drawing its full potential out and dancing it around, like it was scientifically engineered to do so.

 _Ooh, shiny!_ gives way to a more decisive thought:

 _That. That's where I'm going to hang my medal._

Let's see, if the sun slants in at a forty-five degree angle from a window that's twenty-two inches off the ground. . .

* * *

Drakken takes a long swig of his cocoa moo. Ahh! That hits the spot.

That and the basic trigonometry problem he just worked out on one of his disposable placemats. He now has the ideal coordinates of where his nail should go, allowing for the approximate twenty-five inches of the medal's ribbon and the force exerted by its weight. Maybe all you really need to decorate your house is a good grasp of science and mathematics.

And an accent rug or two. It would be so homey next to his bed!

Shego is bringing the medal by later this evening. Something that tantalizingly golden and valuable can't just be left lying around, and no one makes a better protector than Shego. Except _maybe_ Kim Possible, and she's overseas at college and probably still adjusting to not hating Drakken's guts anymore.

(And even then, Shego only ever lost because she was evil and Kim Possible is good. Now that they're on the same side, the equation is balanced, so to speak.)

At any rate, Shego is coming over, and he can't wait to regale her with tales of the hotel and show her around his new house, which he is loving more and more all the time. Sure, it's no Taj Mahal - but isn't that place just a glamorous tomb, anyway?

Drakken licks the bottom of the beaker one last time. He heard somewhere that you're supposed to christen your house with champagne - that stuff that always tastes like spoiled cantaloupe to him. Chocolate milk works every bit as well.

Plus, no ID required.

(Or is that your _boat_ you're supposed to christen with champagne?)

"I'm home," Drakken says, out loud, his sleeve still jammed against his lips to wipe off the cocoa-moostache. "I have a home now."

The words sound like they've been undercooked and even with an exclamation point - "I have a home now!" - are too flat for the occasion. They can't begin to compare to what's smoothing throughout his bloodstream, his own private little hot tub inside him.

Is this what's described as _peace_? He'll have to get the recipe.

 **~It's late, and I'm sleepy*, but let's take a moment to appreciate the people who can still get such a big kick out of a hotel with a pool and free DVD rental. I also appreciate all of my reviewers, including faithful guest reviewer Lionheart. Y'all rock!  
**

 *** = so sleepy I actually wrote "I'll sleepy" the first time. Night, all. . .**


	21. Noble

**~And now, my friends, _Go Team Go_. Expanded version. ;)~**

Dr. Drakken had no idea what Superman was doing in his lair, but he wasn't about to let him spirit away his sidekick.

Seriously. This guy was a dead-ringer for the Man of Steel. One of _those_ types. Chin like a brick slab; body thick as a cedar tree, muscles bulging, the lowest percentage of body fat a human being in reasonable health could have. He even had that distinctive haircut curlicuing toward his forehead that Superman sported in the old films.

Drakken had always hated that type. Not necessarily on sight - it just generally worked out that way.

And Superman had never been his favorite character - although, as a megavillain, Drakken had to admit that if any comic hero were going to take him down, he'd have gone with Superman. Batman wouldn't hesitate to break a leg if it would ease his surrender along, and Spider-Man (spectacular as he may have been) could be just as hurtful with his words.

Drakken was certain he'd never seen the man before - he would have remembered someone this nauseatingly strapping - but something about him seemed familiar. Drakken didn't like the way this man was sizing him up, either. It reminded him too much of how jurists looked at him, trying to measure his guilt with their piercing gazes. Shego, she could bury just about anything, but Drakken could never get his own stuff deep enough to relax under a scan like that.

Superman here was the portrait of self-righteousness if Drakken had ever seen it. His purple comrade was skinny and wiry and _shouldn't_ have looked threatening. His dry expression also tickled at Drakken's recognition without citing an exact source.

None of that could compete with the worst of it:

Drakken didn't know them.

And even _that_ in and of itself wouldn't have been such a trigger, except for one other factor - they knew Shego. Stared her straight in the eye upon arrival, the way hardly anyone who wasn't Kim Possible did.

Oh. . . speaking of Kim Possible. She was here, too. Shego, Drakken knew, would've provided some sardonic remark about the quality of the company dropping by, but his own genius brain was too tangled to find one of his own.

Kim Possible had been the first to show up, actually. She'd ripped his front door right off its hinges - the ones he'd just had oiled, too! Accidentally startled him into dropping the very chemical concoction that would've brought the planet to its knees. The girl was so overpowered that now she was foiling him by _happenstance_. There was no _justice_ in the world.

Especially since, once Drakken whipped around to stare at her, he saw Kim Possible surrounded by a glowing blue aura. They must've built a nuclear power-plant in Middleton since he moved away. How else could you explain why she had a new ability every time Drakken turned around?

"Kim Possible!" Drakken had cried, in something higher-pitched than his usual boom. "Since when do you glow?"

Shego's brows knifed. She said, "Like. . ." and then mumbled something Drakken couldn't make out. It almost sounded like she was saying her own name, and while Shego _did_ glow, she _never_ referred to herself in the third person. Poked fun of Drakken for it all the time.

That was when the entourage had appeared on the scene - Superman, Skinny Purple, and some foolish blond kid Drakken hadn't bothered to search his memory banks for.

Shego had gone white - well, white _r_. The smirk that Drakken had almost thought permanently painted on slipped for a second, then returned, frostier than ever in all that icy-paleness.

"Hello, sister," Superman said.

Where did he get off calling her that?

Shego stared straight ahead, saying nothing. Drakken had never seen her swallow in that self-strangling manner before - and never dreamed he would have - but she was doing it now. She was frightened.

A fierce, hot blast surged through Drakken, boiling up under his pores, where sweat was beginning to squeeze out. It shivered there, unsure of what to do, where to put itself. Drakken knew the feeling.

"You know, we never hear from you." Skinny Purple began ticking off a list of offenses on his fingers. "You never call, you never write. . . a card on my birthday would have been nice."

 _Circus performers_ , Drakken thought crazily. Perhaps they had all worked for the same traveling circus, and Shego - obviously the only one with any talent - had absconded with the profits, and now they'd hired Kim Possible to track her down in order to take revenge? He'd seen a movie like that once. Weird movie. . .

Drakken glanced at Shego for clues, though he quickly realized he wouldn't be getting any from her. Her face was set as stiff and unyielding as the big guy's chest.

 _Protect her._

It was less a thought than an instinct, a violent lash through Drakken's head. He steadied himself, trying to ready his fists, but it seemed to have slipped his reflexes exactly how to ball them up in the first place. A physical fight wouldn't do him a lot of good, right here and right now. As manly a specimen as Drakken tried to believe he was, he was a matchstick compared to the big guy.

If he could only stall him for five minutes or so and grab his Battlebot 900. . . It might've been his only chance against a man who very well could have been a pituitary giant. (Drakken understood the science, but not the wording. "Pituitary" sounded like the gland that made you spit stuff out.)

Drakken took a few steps forward and shielded Shego from Superman. "Uh, I believe some introductions are in order here," he said, striving for a light touch - _effective but not embarrassing_ , that one parenting magazine at the doctor's office had said.

Shego treated him to a glare that could've withered a flower - or a mad scientist - from fifty yards. Drakken was almost grateful when the buffoon came running up to him, pumped his arm in his best imitation of those glad-handing salesmen at the weather-machine-lot, and banished withering to the Realm of the Forgotten. "Hi," the kid said, too happily. "I'm Ron Stoppable. We've met, but you never seem to remember my name."

 _No, I didn't mean_ you _!_ Drakken would've bellowed if his throat hadn't been blocked from all sides like a road closed for construction. He swatted the boy's hand away and felt his pupils drifting together over his nose.

And Shego responded by actually _crossing her arms_ at him - the impudence! She wasn't showing him respect, and she couldn't shut him out like this, not now. How could he be sure these men were trustworthy?

Drakken traded the lightheartedness for a scowl darker than Shego's own. "Shego, as long as you live under my roof, you will follow my rules." He wagged an emphatic finger, ignoring the daggers being thrown his direction. No, he would not cower under Shego's critical eyes this time. "And Rule One is: No secrets. Whatever is going on here. . ."

All the sinew in Shego's forearms tightened. The plasma was about to erupt, Drakken could tell. Now _that_ he would cower under.

Sure enough, when Shego's hands flared to life, it wasn't just a _Drakken-get-off-my-case_. Real pain flared in her eyes.

Drakken's heart cracked, which gave the spurt of fear easy access, and he quickly initiated the CSP (Cajoling Smile Program) and finished lamely, ". . . is obviously a very private matter. So - later, gator! Have fun!"

And, like a coward, he fled.

Drakken sagged against the double-set of doors, feeling very much like he did when one of his own Doomsday devices exploded in his face and left him standing before everyone charred black and bald, save for a few scrawny strands of hair. Impotent. Laughable. Drakken put one hand up to his ponytail to make sure it was still there.

It was. It anchored him a little bit more to the present instead of miring him in the past - someone else's past. A past he'd never known existed, a life he'd never pondered before the point where it intersected with his own.

He felt selfish and greedy and stupid.

Drakken peered between the cracks in the doors' joining at Shego. From the back, she appeared to be three-quarters hair, and despite her fighter's pose, she looked like a little girl.

She _was_ a little girl, as far as Drakken was concerned, young enough not to remember record players or Richard Nixon. Somewhere along the line, someone hadn't taken care of her. And right now, this exact second, she was hurting.

Drakken wanted to stop it, outlaw it. But he couldn't; he was powerless, and it gave him one more motivation to achieve world domination sooner rather than later.

In the meantime, he couldn't let it go unacknowledged.

Drakken tapped the button to open the doors a tad more, and wedged his head into the opening. "You know, Shego, I always thought of us as some kind of. . . evil family," he said, and if the thin voice hadn't been stuttering what was scrolling through his mind, he never would have identified it as his. "And families stick together. So - if you need anything. . ."

The plasma had eaten a hole straight through the doors before Drakken even saw the blur of green and black twist toward him. He jumped backward - lightning reflexes - just in time to avoid the graze. A squeak, an actual squeak, slipped out of him, and with it came the rest of his speech:

"I'll be here for you."

Too fast, too shrill, and yet there it was.

Shego snapped herself back around, her face still vacant of any visible emotion.

It didn't matter to Drakken as he sank back against the doors, his body tingling as though awakening from numbness. Shego might have been able to plasma him into submission, but she couldn't make him stop caring.

That was probably why his hands were quaking so badly when he brought them up to his mouth and pressed them there.

"So," Shego said, "it looks like all of my least favorite people got together to form a club. Why?"

Now _there_ was the sarcasm Drakken would've expected from her. Perfectly delivered, too. He considered sticking his head back out and praising her for it, until one glance at the still-smoldering hole, green residue dripping toxically from the edges, gave him second thoughts.

Superman said something else Drakken didn't understand, and the rest whitewashed into a blur for him. Kim Possible's sharp commands. Shego's resigned sigh. The buffoon's excitement. Footsteps.

For twenty minutes or so, Drakken waited to hear the screech of door hinges before it occurred to him that his were no longer operational, thanks to Kim Possible. When he peeked out again, blinking his contacts back to attention, the lair was empty.

It had, factually speaking, been emptier before. It had just never _felt_ it.

* * *

 _She's still wearing the jumpsuit_ , was the first thing to cross Hego's mind when his sister came into view.

After all these years, Shego had never ditched the Team Go uniform. That must have meant there was still some love in her heart toward them, even if her face upon seeing them didn't prove it. Her lips, painted that same Gothic-black that Hego had never approved of, bunched up into something just short of a snarl.

Hego straightened to his full six-foot-three and willed Shego to return his gaze. She did, though hollowly. It was a power she'd always wielded just as fiercely as her plasma. It took him back to a happier time.

It was then that Hego noticed the short-legged man who scampered across the room toward Shego, his fists already cocked and curled onto his pathetic excuses for hips. Here. In Shego's place of residence.

 _Oh, sweet wings of justice - she's not LIVING with this man, is she?_

Hego took a moment to collect himself, even as his stomach sank toward the floor. This was something you had to be prepared to face when dealing with a wayward sibling. Especially since Shego's beauty had only deepened since she'd cut out on them, if that were possible.

Seeing her sitting there, his baby sister all grown up, so lovely and mature - it choked Hego up a tad.

But he didn't like the looks of this man, and it wasn't the blue skin. He was too old for Shego, for one thing, with those dark pouches beneath his wide-yet-beady eyes. He hunched over himself like a vulture, his chin jutted at a pugnacious angle. His shaggy hair rose in peaks and fell in valleys with no actual semblance of order. A devotee of chaos if Hego had ever seen one.

It was both concerning and baffling. This guy didn't seem like Shego's type.

She could certainly do better.

Nevertheless, Hego had the presence of mind - that was something all good superheroes needed to have, presence of mind - to peg the man in an instant: Aggressive. Possessive. The kind he'd seen over and over again in comic books and on courtroom dramas.

He wanted to punch the guy, but a good superhero always remained professional. "Hello, sister," Hego said in his most formal tone.

She didn't even nod, wouldn't acknowledge him.

Nor did she reply to Mego's never-ending complaint about her missing his birthday. Not even when the no-account boyfriend stepped in, walling her off from Hego, and said, "Uh - I believe some introductions are in order here."

Hego added _controlling_ and _entitled_ to that list.

That Ron kid, who grasped the concept of Go-Operation in a way very few civilians did, ran right up to the blue man and shook his hand. How the likable kid could even manage to _touch_ this man was beyond Hego. Ron said, "Hi, I'm Ron Stoppable. We've met, but you never seem to remember my name" - which left the man cross-eyed and stupefied.

Hego fought back a smirk. This guy was clearly not as bright as his nerdish appearance would suggest.

The look the man gave Shego wasn't the drooly one Hego had feared. "Shego," he said, "as long as you live under my roof, you will follow my rules. And rule one is: no secrets."

Ah. Now he was trying to invoke the authority card. He wasn't privy to the fact that Shego had been scoffing authority ever since she was old enough to roll over. This man _couldn't_ have known that, because he'd never been the one to try and feed her strained peas.

Sure enough, Shego lit up her plasma, and the man blurted out something too quick and desperate for Hego to catch, and skittered toward the nearest set of double doors with his lab coat tucked between his legs. For once, Shego's rebelliousness came in handy.

She'd never respected Hego as the leader of the team, always second-guessing his plans and even rewriting them, as if she were his old English teacher taking aim with her red pen. Her modifications were good, Hego had to admit, but he'd wanted to spare her that responsibility. Shego already shouldered far too much for such a young girl -

"Shego. . . I always thought of us as some kind of evil family." A voice interrupted Hego's thoughts, a man's voice drained of the thunder that would make any big brother tense. Hego didn't have to turn around to be sure it was the boyfriend, though he never would've thought _shy_ fit on that list. "And families stick together."

 _Family_. About the last word Hego would've expected him to use.

When the man continued, Shego turned around and threw plasma straight at his head. He jerked back, was missed by an inch, and the words that came out of him were as squeaky as Ron's: "I'll be here for you."

Hmm. Either Shego had chosen a guy who would take great risks to manipulate her - or one who actually cared somewhat.

For her sake, Hego hoped it was the second one.

The man gave Shego one last imploring glance before vanishing behind the doors for good. Hego waited for the hostility that was thick in the air to follow him out, and he was still waiting when Shego swiveled back to them, expressionless as ever save for the smile-without-a-smile that she played over the group in general.

"So," she said, "it looks like all of my least favorite people got together to form a club. Why?"

She had to say that. She couldn't let on that she was concerned. Not in front of her boyfriend.

Although the little speech that man had just given didn't have Hego entirely convinced that was the reason. "Aviarius," was all he said.

The once-hated name didn't even earn a flinch from Shego. "And I care because. . . ?"

"He stole my superpower," Mego answered. "I mean, _our_ superpowers," he added after a glare from Hego.

It was nothing compared to the green darts Shego's eyes were throwing his way. "Yeah, not my problem," she said, snapping herself away from them.

Out of nowhere, Hego's memory blasted two decades back. Mom and Dad had gone on a date one night and left him to be more of a referee than a baby-sitter to toddler Shego and kindergarten Mego. Only once they were both settled in bed did Hego have any peace.

Even that was fleeting. He'd just settled in with a bowl of microwave popcorn and an episode of _Fearless Ferret_ when a scream ripped through the upstairs.

Shego's.

Hego was in her bedroom and had dropped to his knees beside her bed in a flash. Shego was sitting straight up in bed, crying in hiccups instead of tears, her fingers stabbing in and out of her already-long black hair.

 _"What's the matter, sis?"_

 _"I had a bad dream."_

 _"About what?"_ Hego remembered sitting down, pulling her into his lap. She slid in neatly with plenty of room left over.

 _"Clowns. Big clown monsters with angry faces and mean teeth. In my room. It was really creepy. I know it sounds silly. . ."_

 _"No, it doesn't."_ Hego's reply had been in all sincerity. _"Clown villains are the worst. But anything that wants into your room has to get past me first."_

Shego's fingers had clenched around his, so much stronger than they looked.

 _"Do you want me to stay with you for a bit?"_

And instead of answering, she'd nuzzled her head into his chest and sighed.

Back then, Hego had watched her face slowly relax as she eased into trusting him. Her present relaxation was studied and cold.

Who was this girl turning away from them, and what had she done with his sweet little sister?

As if the Wegos' kidnapping wasn't bad enough -

"He has the twins," Hego heard himself say. "Aviarius has the Wegos."

"There's no telling what he could do, armed with my powers," Mego added.

"Oooh, yeah. He could change sizes until the twins break." Shego hissed in the derisive manner that a good superhero never employed. "Get over yourself, Shrinking Violet!"

"Do not call me that!" Mego said, finger poised as if to jab her.

Shego ignored him completely.

Good, good. They were bickering again. Just like old times.

The coldness stayed in place, but Shego sighed like a villain resigned to a prison sentence - the exact opposite of the contented, three-year-old sigh he'd never forgotten. "Fine," she said, in a huff that blew her bangs up. "Let's go get the Go Jet and fly over to his stupid lair. . ."

" _Go_ get the Go Jet," Ron repeated with a giggle.

Hego could appreciate the play on words. Shego couldn't, and she frosted the room with a single look. She was better than The Spectacular Ice-Man (first appearance Kazaam Comics, May 1972).

"Okay, the lame gets put away _now_." Shego zippered her hands through the air. "You think of any more wonderful jokes, feel free to write 'em down and send 'em to _Reader's Digest_. That goes for Stoppable and anyone else who doesn't want second-degree burns. Now - here's what we're gonna do."

There she went again, taking charge of the mission while Hego was standing right there in front of her. And why? He was the eldest and as such, it was _his_ job to glue the family back together, not hers. What happened to Mom and Dad was taxing enough - Shego hadn't needed any more stress in her life.

Hego had seen the rage as she'd repeatedly kicked the villains, until their uniforms tore and they begged to be whisked off to jail. He'd heard Shego's sass spiral into deeper and darker places with every argument. He'd been there when she snatched her high-school diploma away from her principal and held it over her head with a triumph that almost seemed vicious.

But none of that mattered now. They were a team again, a family again. Maybe the power of that would be strong enough to lure her back home, because without her -

Without Shego.

Five years later, and here was the team - scattered like so much confetti in the wind.

Hego was suddenly hit by a prospect that scared him more than any of Aviarius's avian artillery.

 _Did I fail my family?_

Mom would've said there was no such thing as failing as long as you tried your best. Shego wouldn't have.

* * *

 _Don't think about Shego. Don't think about Shego._

That mantra was about as effective for Drakken as, _Don't think about my giant pimple; don' t think about my giant pimple_ had been in the eighth grade when he was talking to the only girl in class who didn't treat him as though he had bird flu or something else hideously contagious. Every few minutes - or seconds - his brain kept scurrying back to Shego: Shego all afraid and bitter in her jumpsuit that matched theirs. Shego with the skin on her forehead actually puckering. Shego wheeling on Drakken at his offer to help.

Why did he let her go with them? Why?

Because he'd dreaded her plasma punches - a perfectly legitimate reason that was starting to sound more and more like a yellow-bellied cop-out.

From a scientific standpoint, he was being ridiculous, Drakken decided after the last of the chemical spill had been wiped up and safely deposited in the nearest biohazard box. He yanked his biohazard suit down to remove it; the cuffs caught on his knobbed ankles, forcing him to kick it off with a wild flail and a grunt. Shego was the strongest, most capable person he knew. She could clean the floor - or whatever the term was - with Superman and Skinny Purple without breaking a nail.

He just needed to get his mind on other things, was all.

Drakken growled under his breath. Yes, well, that would have been a lot easier two hours ago, when he'd still held chemical warfare in a test tube. Before Kim Possible busted into his lair, busted a perfectly good door, busted a foolproof scheme, and made off with his sidekick. Drakken tried not to believe in bad omens - but if ever he did in a moment of weakness, he would rank redheaded teenagers above black cats any day.

What else was a mad scientist to do but pace?

Drakken took the floor in determined-if-shrimpy strides. No, there had to be some way to salvage this - some shortcut, some fail-safe, even some copycat that might work to fool the absolute _children_ they hired to be global ambassadors these days.

There was a whole world of evil out there, Drakken reassured himself, and he had just scratched the surface of it.

He would defeat Kim Possible yet, through the Law of Infinite Probability if nothing else!

Within half an hour, Drakken was standing in the lair's Command Central, his nose buried in a five-pound chemistry textbook. He was just beginning to adjust his giddiness, transfer it to a new scheme, when he heard someone say his name.

Drakken jolted like a puppet whose strings had been grabbed from behind, even though it was painfully far from professional. Nobody else was in the room with him. The henchmen couldn't sneak up on anyone to save their lives. That was what he had Shego for.

(Oops. Thought about Shego again.)

There was only one other possibility. Drakken glanced down at his computer terminal. A freckle-studded face, topped by a dark cotton ball of hair, stared back at him.

Drakken jolted backward again, not as far this time. He _knew_ this face, could tell by the tingling at the base of his neck where his hackles hadn't risen yet but were stirring to alert. That had to mean it was associated with either the Possible family or Professor Dementor.

And this kid was wearing such a disgustingly pious, I'm-just-trying-to-help expression that it had to be. . .

"You're Kim Possible's computer interface!" Drakken said. Ah, yes, he could see now why it had taken a moment to place it; the last time he saw that face, it was twisted in fear of him. What ever happened to that? "And now you're inside _my_ computer! How did you get past my firewall?" That was the virtual equivalent to having five deadbolt locks on each side of your door.

The kid blinked as if he didn't understand, and maybe he didn't. Just as Drakken was contemplating switching over to binary, the boy said, "I'm not a virus. . . I'm a person."

"Gghk." Drakken got his arms arranged in a crisp fold to remove the image of goofy gullibility Kim Possible and her team always managed to detect in him, even though it wasn't _really_ there. "That's what they all say!"

"Look, Dr. Drakken. We don't have a lot of time." The kid's firmness was surprisingly paralyzing, considering it hadn't yet reached beyond the cusp of adolescence. Drakken could feel his entire face expanding into one giant pimple, glowing red as a strawberry. "You might wanna sit down."

Drakken plopped directly to the floor.

"We need your help," the kid said.

A full-fledged guffaw teetered on Drakken's lips. It only died when the kid locked his eyes right into Drakken's. "Lemme rephrase that," he said. " _Shego_ needs your help."

Drakken had always wanted an underwater lair, and now he was pretty convinced he'd been abruptly shifted into one. Pressure built in his ears, gravity went helter-skelter, and he couldn't quite breathe no matter how many gasps he yanked out of the air.

"Is it the circus performers?" Drakken blurted.

"Circus performers?"

"Yes!" Drakken said. "Those strange men who dropped by and took her away. They had to have all been in the circus together, because they were wearing the same uniforms! And I _knew_ they were bad news! That big fellow was trying to act like he was noble, but -"

"Drakken," Wade said, as though exasperated - and what right did he have to be? "Those weren't circus performers. Those were her brothers."

Everything Drakken knew turned inside-out.

"Her. . . what?" he said, and then promptly bit the inside of his cheek. The last thing he needed was for this child to start rattling off the technical definition of a _brother_ , which was what Drakken would've done in his shoes. What was the point of being a genius if you couldn't rub it in now and again?

This kid, however, didn't. "You were right about them all wearing the same uniform," he said, tapping away at his keyboard. "They all used to be part of a superhero team called Team Go."

The inverted picture of Drakken's life sat up and taunted him.

"I. . . I think I need to sit down," he said.

The kid coughed into the heel of his hand. "You're already sitting down."

"Oh. So I am." Drakken grasped for the side of the nearest computer shaft, feeling the cold comfort of technology against his glove, and closed his eyes. No, actually, the kid defining a word for him, however condescendingly, was _far_ from the last thing he needed. Twelve or thirteen worse scenarios had just walloped him in the gut.

Skinny Purple had the general U-shaped jaw that Drakken could commiserate with, but his narrowed down at the edges until it _almost_ formed Shego's signature point. And the you're-all-wasting-my-time smirk could have only been created by her DNA.

 _Shego had a family._ Has _a family. A big one, it sounds like. Then why - why did she become evil?_ The villain business was intended for quirky loners who hadn't seen any family except for their coddling mothers since the day of their high school graduation.

 _But Shego's_ my _family! And I thought I was hers._

The thought poked at Drakken with the threat of puncture. If she really did have multiple brothers - one of whom was as big and strong as Superman to boot - what niche did Drakken fill in her life now? Or did he at all?

Ugh. He'd presented that whole dissertation on their "evil family" in the presence of her _biological_ family. The invisible-but-oh-so-present pimple throbbed someplace Drakken couldn't reach.

The only thing that soothed it was the truly scrumptious realization that _Shego had once been a superhero_. _That_ was ammunition of the highest order. Whenever she next got onto him about wriggling around with his puppy, Drakken could just dangle that in front of her and they'd be even again.

"I know this is a lot to take in," the kid said, jarring Drakken's eyes back open. Drakken leaned in closer, and everything mischievous and lighthearted in him went down his mental garbage disposal. "But, like I said, Shego needs your help."

"All right," Drakken said, panic scraping the sides of his pitch. "I'm here. Did her brothers hurt her?"

The curly head shook. "Shego and her brothers are all at the mercy of a villain named Aviarius. He stole all of their superpowers to use _against_ them!"

All of the many fears that had clawed their way into Drakken's nerves over the years - fear of Kim Possible kicking him in the face, fear of jail, fear of Mother finding out his true occupation, fear of spiders - none of them were in the same neighborhood as this fear. This turned him into one big blue block of ice, spiking his eyelashes together.

 _Aviarius_. The name brought to mind - well, a zoo's aviary. Not any of those pretty parrots from the rainforest, though. More along the lines of a bird of prey, whose beak's curve was designed to tear flesh, whose senses were honed to find prey.

There was a whole world of evil out there, and he'd just scratched the surface.

Those talons would never get the chance to close around Shego, Drakken vowed. Her brothers were obviously hapless, unseasoned do-gooders who were unaware of a villain's tricks. Only the great and glorious Dr. Drakken would do!

This time he would not run away. Shego needed him.

Drakken discovered how rapidly the human heart could slow from its pounding into the steady beat of a promise. He uncoiled his fists, stiffened his posture, and was able to contain the anxiety into one part of his body, the way a Time Lord could do with radiation.

"I'm on my way," Drakken said. The cold sound clinking between his words would have been wonderfully disturbing under other circumstances. He'd never been able to achieve it before.

"Thanks," the kid said. He actually seemed relieved. "I'm faxing you the coordinates now."

Drakken pressed both palms against the screen. "Tell her I'll coming! Tell her I'll be right there!"

A heavy sigh. "I'll do what I can."

"Over and out," Drakken replied. He'd always _wanted_ to say that. Shego wouldn't have taken it seriously, would've swarmed it with critiques.

Surely she wouldn't keep criticizing his every movement after he had come to her rescue. Why, he'd be her hero!

Drakken reached forward and snatched up the fax with fingers he could see trembling. He stuffed them into his pockets as he marched toward the special closet where his latest Doombot stood dormant.

And he went forth to rescue his Shego.

* * *

"Look, after I left, I went to work for a guy who wants to take over the world!"

Forced into a submissive curl a good superhero rarely found themselves in, Hego vaguely recalled watching the families of those who'd turned out to be supervillains interviewed, asked if they'd seen it coming, if there had been something about the criminal even in their childhood. Some said yes. A few said no. Many were too shaken to remember one way or the other.

His answer would have been no, Hego decided now.

Sure, Shego had been cranky from the time she was a baby. But her tantrums had been the same as any other toddler's - sobbing screams, toys being thrown, hot, angry, desperate. There wasn't so much as a trace of the cold, devious woman standing here now who pulled it off with almost a touch of class.

Not even in her middle-school years, when she had developed the caustic attitude and perfected the eye-roll. Not even in high school, when she crouched over the villains as if just waiting for one of them to twitch and give her permission to demonstrate violent force -

All the threats in the _world_ to her phone time and car privileges wouldn't save them now.

Or the world. Or their sister.

It might all fall apart right here in front of him, because for the first time since Hego was eight years old, making a citizens' arrest didn't feel synonymous with justice.

Shego had always had a little something unfamiliar to him and the rest of the brothers. That didn't mean it had to be _evil_. Hego had assumed it was just some feminine thing.

"I. Am. Evil!" Shego spit the words like Dad's old pickup backfiring. "Have I made myself clear?"

"Yes!" Mego said - hurriedly and minus his cockiness.

"Perfectly clear!" one of the Wegos said.

"Totally evil!" his twin chimed in.

And then they all fell silent, as if the Mighty Silencer (first appeared in a short-lived, self-titled series in the '60s) had flown in and silenced them. Hego had never been so disappointed in his family.

It appeared to satisfy Shego, however, and maybe that was the greater priority at the moment. She swept back to face Hego, her eyes - those pretty eyes she'd gotten from Mom, shaped like a cat's - cutting into his like a pair of scissors. _Bring it on so I can take you down,_ they said.

Hego tried. Doggone it, he tried. He climbed to his feet briefly and started to head toward her and her ill-gained powers. . .

. . . and he felt her little head against his chest, saw the bit of pale scalp showing through her part.

 _What happened to you, sister? What made you this way? What did we do wrong?_ Hego longed to ask.

And he knew he'd receive an insult in response.

A filmy layer blocked Hego's vision, and he sank back to his knees. Shego was wagging her head from side to side, in the same manner she always had when she was pointing out how lame one of his plans was, jerking the sharp features that had all once been so cute and pixie-like.

She was still his sister. No longer sweet, and not innocent anymore - yet still his baby sister. He couldn't harm so much as one prolific hair on her head.

A good superhero didn't let their personal feelings stand in the way of upholding the law.

But Hego was a brother first and foremost.

He was actually relieved when the back wall caved under the foot of a giant robot. It didn't look like one of Aviarius's gizmos - no wings or beaks to be seen - and even if it _was_ something of Aviarius's, Hego would've given up the superstrength he didn't even have anymore if it meant they'd go back to fighting a foe he _could_ slug. Guy as scrawny as Aviarius, you didn't need superpowers to knock his block off.

The robot's visor squeaked open, and the voice that called down, "Shego!" was stretched into shrillness as if from a too-tight shirt. Hego glanced up. If it had been the Oh Boyz themselves, he couldn't have been more flabbergasted.

It was Shego's boyfriend.

Except he no longer seemed a prospective suitor. The man's dark eyes, which didn't look so beady and sinister now, darted around frantically, then softened with relief. It was like he'd been expecting to find Shego locked up in a cage or something.

Hego knew the feeling well.

Shego was frozen to the spot, brandishing the staff cockeyed over her head, her mouth agape as it had been in second grade when Mom had shown up waving the lunchbox she'd forgotten that morning. If Hego weren't mistaken, she was embarrassed.

"Shego!" the blue man said again. "Kim Possible's computer kid called me and told me you were at the mercy of a _villain_. Where is this _Aviarius_?" Those eyes slit down to someplace dangerous, and Hego briefly considered that this might be the world conqueror of whom Shego had been speaking.

Looking at the frightened blue face before him, though, Hego couldn't see the punk he'd met a few hours before, much less some monster who had lured Shego into a life of depravity. There wasn't even the leering expectancy of a guy who hoped to date her.

His chopped syllables and sweat-soaked cheeks belonged to a hero, and only one particular breed of hero: a big brother.

Such utter terror blazed across Aviarius that Hego almost felt sorry for him, although of course the little vulture found a way out almost immediately. "Right here," he said, pointing to the Stoppable kid.

The man's gaze went stone-blank.

"No, man!" Ron chuckled. "Dr. Drakken knows who I am!" He glanced at the blue man hopefully.

 _Dr. Drakken._ It did have a menacing ring to it in many ways, not the least of which that it gave no clue as to his powers. Aviarius, Electronique, the Mathter - all of their gimmicks were innately obvious.

But the man named Dr. Drakken was nodding slowly, fingers drumming as he stared at a random point. "Yes," he said. "The name escapes me, but I do recognize the air of buffoonery."

Stoppable's spirits fell and hit the ground with an audible crash.

Hego startled at the sound, turned, and saw that it hadn't come from the Stoppable kid at all. It was the staff, now lying smashed in hazardous bits of broken glass a good superhero would clean up before anyone could get themselves hurt. Great clouds of blue, purple, red, and green puffed up from it and settled back down over their rightful owners.

Through their haze, even as he felt his superstrength return, Hego could see Kim Possible perched on the ground in a successful post-kick squat. Shego's fingers were sticking out in a halfhearted swipe.

The girl had reaction time like a tigress's. She could have caught it -

Shego recovered her tigress-growl in nothing flat. "Let's _go_ ," she said, disgust pouring, as she swung herself up onto one of the robot's external ports.

Dr. Drakken flashed her a toothy grin that reminded Hego of the Joker, back when he was written as a deranged prankster and not a sadistic murderer. "You can thank me later," he said smugly.

Hego wanted to thank him _now_. He'd saved Shego from herself.

Shego didn't reply. She just dropped herself into the seat beside him, as graceful as ever, while Dr. Drakken leaned over her. He was all earnestness, and Hego didn't need to read his lips to know he was mouthing the question, _Are you okay?_

Something gave unexpectedly in Hego's chest, and he reached out one arm to snag Aviarius before he could slip away in the chaos. What surprised him was that Shego kept her focus on them until the robot disappeared from sight. It wasn't hatred in her eyes anymore. Something. . . else.

Whatever it was, it was concealed so well, Hego could tell why she no longer needed to wear the mask.

He glanced around at the room's other occupants. Kim Possible and Stoppable were high-fiving. The Wegos' faces struggled. Mego looked more awkward than he had since he'd been caught sneaking into the girls' locker room, shrunk to the size of a bean, as a freshman.

Hego wouldn't lie - he was fighting back some pretty un-heroic weeping himself. Yes, the four of them had reunited and worked as a team, a team that would continue, and that was something worth celebrating.

But - Shego -

How were they ever going to live with the truth of what she'd become?

Hego did the only thing he knew to do. He hefted Aviarius over one shoulder and cleared his throat. "Looks like this bird is ready for his cage," he declared.

That prompted a squawky groan. "Must you say that _every time_ you capture me?" Aviarius said.

He whined it so miserably, Hego threw back his head and roared with laughter. A laugh that only grew when he glanced down at the scattered pieces of that staff.

At least there was that. That and the fact that there was someone in Shego's life - whoever he was - who still sought to protect her. Mad scientists were generally emotionally-wrecked show-offs, Hego had learned, but they didn't waste a wall-obliterating entrance on someone who meant nothing to them.

Not that it made this Dr. Drakken noble or anything. Just. . . maybe, possibly, more complex than Hego had pegged him.

A good superhero was willing to keep an open mind.

* * *

"For the last time, Dr. D., I'm _fine_."

They'd see about that. Before ten minutes had passed, Drakken had activated the Doombot 900's emergency health-and-safety function, which would scan all occupants for everything from from lacerations to pinkeye. And he let them run to completion, despite Shego's insistence that Aviarius was a joke villain who couldn't have hurt anyone even if he'd wanted to.

Of course, Shego said that about guys as formidable as _him_ , too.

At this moment, however, the results jived - err, _jibed_ \- with Shego's account. She was fine. Physically.

It was the first time in recent memory that Shego had appeared as anything less than invincible. The hatchet look that always chopped so deeply into Drakken seemed more of a dull blade, and sequins of perspiration had formed on her forehead. Drakken himself was breathing like a chainsaw, and he hadn't been the one facing a humanoid eagle - or eagloid human - so he could only imagine what Shego felt.

Seriously, he could only imagine, because Shego had buried whatever it was all the way down at her core. Her body language revealed as much as her face - which was to say, nothing. To even begin to guess her thoughts, X-ray vision would be required.

Like Superman's.

Drakken's mind tripped over that thought as if over a crack in the sidewalk. The Superman impersonator who'd shown up at his lair a few exaggeratedly-long hours ago - whose real name Drakken had already misplaced, except that it wasn't Clark Kent - was Shego's big brother, her _very_ big brother. And he'd crashed cluelessly onto the scene to find his sister in the company of a strange man. It couldn't have been more out of context if it were designed to be anti-Drakken propaganda, but Drakken could understand it all now: the critical once-over, the bunching of those enviable muscles, the instincts sharpened and readied with the same fearful courage that had wriggled inside Drakken.

After all, the brother had undoubtedly once driven Shego to school. Made sure she ate her vegetables. Helped her learn to ride a two-wheeler.

It was no longer Superman's muscles Drakken was envying.

The man hadn't been playacting at being noble. He truly was.

Which left Shego as big a question mark as ever.

"You'd tell me if you _were_ hurt?" Drakken said. That was a question, too, although it wasn't meant to be.

"I guess." Shego's shrug was so casual it set Drakken's underbite on edge. Where was the gratitude? Wasn't she supposed to be groveling at his feet right about now? "Not that I ever would be. I'm tough."

Drakken laced his fingers together, leaving only his thumbs free for a contemplative twiddle. "Not as tough as you act," he muttered.

" _Excuse_ me?" Shego's entire forehead lifted, evaporating the sweat.

"You let Kim Possible win."

Shego's snort was worth the proverbial thousand words. She thought Drakken was dreaming things, imagining them with the same creativity he used to think up doom weapons.

Drakken counted it up. Okay, so that was only nineteen words. Big deal.

And he _wasn't_ faking it. He _hadn't_ imagined the only sentiment that had ever slipped through Shego's stone-faced force field in all the years he'd known her, and Drakken wasn't going to miss an opportunity to dangle it over her head the way Shego always did with the chipped-up edges of his menace.

"Oh, come on," Drakken said. "I saw it. You practically _gave_ her that staff."

"Whatever," was Shego's answer. There was absolutely nothing soft about her at the moment. She was as prickly as a cactus.

But that wasn't justification enough to let the matter drop. Not when he'd finally found some common ground with her. Drakken cocked half his eyebrow at her with the utmost sophistication. "Now that I know the whole story, I think that, in the end, you couldn't betray your. . . family." Forming those particular six letters gave him an ache in the forefront of his throat, straight down to his collarbone.

"Are you saying I'm going _soft_?" Shego leaned toward him, smiling like someone who was about to play a Draw Two _Uno_ card.

It fit nicely with where Drakken was going.

He skipped an even bigger grin back at her, showing her he hadn't had anything that played and would've had to draw anyway, so _ha_! "As a marshmallow," Drakken said happily.

Then Shego lurched forward, fists drawn taut, and Drakken suddenly realized she wasn't being playful. He had the same nanosecond of awareness that always kicked in when he'd poured the wrong two chemicals into the Bunsen burner, and he only had enough time to say _Oh snap!_ before the explosion -

And then Shego lunged at him, lissome as a lynx, and her hands were grabbing his belt, and he was being hoisted and then he was thrown right out the window, below the stars and above an immense bay of water.

Drakken's fingertips shot out and latched onto the robot's blaster-feet. With the engine warmed up and raring, they were hot enough to blister, but to let go meant. . . .well, something far worse than blisters. The only comforting thought was that Shego had thrown him at an angle where it was easy to snag a piece of the robot and hang on, so she couldn't have been out to kill him.

Just scare him. Which - Drakken gulped - might work if he stayed out here too long and lost all feeling in his legs, which were already slackening like melting plastic.

How the tables had turned; it was now _his_ turn to grovel, and the irony was sickening.

"Shego!" Drakken cried. "Shego, I was wrong, okay? Shego, I'm sorry! Please let me back in! Shego! You're not soft at all!"

And she really wasn't, because for several throbbing moments Drakken wasn't at all certain she was going to haul him back inside.

When the Doombot 900's back visor flipped open, Shego's glare had never been a more welcome sight.

"Lemme in?" Drakken's request came out as a mortifying peep.

Shego examined her gloves. "What's the password?" she said dryly.

Hmmm. She was either fishing for an apology or his bank-account password. And since his funds were already lagging in the red, Drakken offered up an, "I'm sorry?"

That seemed to be the correct answer, because Shego shot out, curled her fingers around his wrists, and got the upper half of his body in. Drakken pulled his remaining appendages in himself and collapsed at her feet, one green boot and one black one, his stomach pounding and butterflies in his heart. . . or was that the other way around?

"I really am sorry," Drakken said, dusting soot from his lab coat and wishing egos brushed off that easily. "I wasn't just saying that so you'd let me back in."

She'd gotten so inordinately angry, it was as though he'd reached out to poke her teasingly and ended up stabbing her in a newly-stitched wound. For that, Drakken was sorry.

"Whatever you say, Doc." Shego had already turned away from him, the fencepost-stiffness in her back discernible even under all that hair. "I'm just gonna ask you to add that to my contract when we get home: Never, ever bring up my 'family.'" She twitched quotation marks around the words.

"Why?" Drakken's scientific curiosity got the better of him again.

"Because I hate them."

Drakken wasn't getting that vibe - he'd felt hate coming off her like steam before, and he didn't now - but he nodded anyway. A sense of regret did cling to her - much as, Drakken theorized, it did to any villain when you got within zapping distance of their backstory. There was also something else to her, something that must have been legible in its native language, if only he could have translated it.

It was the same thing there in her eyes when she looked down at the staff - such a wondrous piece of tech, so tragically shattered as though it had been subjected to the complete range of Kelvin temperatures. No, certainly not softness; Shego's face was as hard and white as a bone.

But perhaps a scrap of nobility.

 **First time writing for Hego, too, so I hope his voice wasn't completely identical to Drakken's, considering they have some remarkable things in common (delusions of grandeur, protective instincts, a flair for the dramatic).**

 **And phew! Is Shego ever a complex character! Hope you all enjoyed and I'll see you next time.~**


	22. Nowhere to Go

**~Part Three of Four of Shego's origin story. She did have other options besides Drakken. . . didn't she?  
**

 **Would like to add that I love all the villains in this chapter. That just doesn't translate well to writing from Shego's POV. ;)**

 **Thanks for the reviews.~**

 _Between the ages of two and five years, children have many developmental milestones ahead of them. . ._

Shego stopped her pen before it could autopilot down the words, _Which none of my brothers have reached yet_. A college essay was NOT the place to vent.

Actually, come to think of it, there wasn't a whole lot of space left in her life for venting, period. And Shego was A-OK with that. She'd watched the supervillains, the losers who'd never make it outside of Go City, drone on and on about their backstory and their motivation until everyone was bored to tears. Shego would've gladly swapped her plasma for the power to mute everybody on the block, though a few green bolts heaved their direction usually went a long way toward shutting them up.

Nah, Shego saw herself as more of an enigma. A dark riddle, with a past the goody-goodies could only guess at, and a no-doy future of success. A figure manipulating everyone from the shadows, never revealing a thing about herself.

Not that she was trying to become a Catwoman type. Dis _gust_. Those gals in those lame comic books may have acted sly and sharp-witted, but they'd be desert-island-stranded if you managed to take away their cleavage, their snapping whips, and their sultry purrs.

Shego chucked her pen down completely, leaving an inky streak on the paper that she swiped off as quick as that weird lizard the Wegos had once had could snap up flies. It was time to put the essay on hold for now anyway. If she didn't hurry, she'd be late to her first job interview, on the Isle of Killigan.

The dude already had his own island named after him. Either he was as driven as Shego was, or he'd just had the good luck to be descended from ye olde Scottish lairds.

Shego retrieved the slip of paper from her leg pouch to refresh herself on Killigan's first name.

 _Duff_. Yeah, that sounded about right. Couldn't have been more stereotypically Scottish if it had been _Bagpipes_.

Dweebiness aside, sitting down and talking business with a supervillain who _hadn't_ known her since she was ten, was the closest thing to an exciting thought Shego had had in about that long. Not having to follow any more ridiculous rules, half of which only existed in that strawberry smoothie Hego had for brains? Tangling with _real_ heroes and not the cheap knockoffs her brothers were? Finally having control over someone ELSE's misery?

 _Heck, yeah._

Consulting her watch again, Shego tapped the essay papers together and forked them into the dresser drawer, where even the stupidest maid couldn't sweep it up by accident, and shoved her issue of _Villains_ magazine into her black shoulder bag, between tubes of Blackberry lipstick and her emergency supply of cash. That bag was the first thing she'd been "allowed" to splurge on in forever. Dropping her credit card into the Club Banana cashier's hand had been every luscious bit as satisfying as it must've been to squeeze by with a fake ID.

Shego hiked the bag into place and then did a cold, clinical pan of her hotel room. This was her last chance to turn back - presuming the police didn't already have an APB out on her. But _that_ would've meant her brothers had snitched.

For once, Shego couldn't predict Hego's actions right down to each individual, martyred hand gesture. What was he gonna do when his irrational drive to "keep the family together" collided with his equally irrational duty to what he always called "the law"? _Not so black-and-white this time, is it, Captain Lame?_

Maybe he'd just go ahead and self-destruct like the little by-the-numbers robot he probably was.

There was no small amount of delight at that image. Shego snorted and reached for the door. For a second, her glove looked almost weird, alone and electric green as it throttled the doorknob. She was used to it being swallowed up in a clumsy tangle of -

Shego refused to shut her eyes, but _this_ image went on ahead and formed in her mind anyway. Five hands joined in a vow. The big and small, blocky and slender, tender and tough. Shego experienced a moment's hesitation.

But then she could hear the Wegos shrieking about something - and Mego whining about something else - and Hego's voice going up into some pompous speech about justice and morality - and the moment passed.

It passed big-time.

* * *

Hench had been kind enough to loan Shego one of his helicopters for the flight overseas. Of course, he didn't _know_ about it, but she'd left him a nice little tip he'd have no choice but to appreciate, even if it WERE only about a quarter of what he would've charged her for it.

The Isle of Killigan was smaller than Shego would've thought. Smaller and more run-down. Sort of a dump, really. Whoever this Killigan guy was, he didn't give much of a rip about his family's ancestral home.

Shego liked him already.

She crossed the marshy front lawn toward the castle - and that was what it was. A stinkin' castle. Pressed her finger to the doorknob and heard it chime off the walls like a pipe organ on drugs. A raspy voice from inside told her to "hold yer horses - I'm comin'!"

Yep. Brogue as thick as Hego's skull.

And when the man reached the front door and scraped it open, he was wearing a legit kilt. Stitched into a plaid pattern that probably meant something to him, complete with one of those furry doohickeys hanging just below the waist, its slicked-up hem waved right above his chunky knees. It wasn't _totally_ dweeby, not the way it would've been in America, but Shego still couldn't hold back a snicker at the sight of it.

"And who might you be, then?" the shorter-than-Shego man asked. His pointy auburn beard was bludgeoned at her.

"I'm Shego. I have an interview today, remember? Jack Hench called you and set it up?"

"Aye, of course." Duff gave her a sheepish grin. "I didnae expect you to be so young."

Shego directed her gaze down to the green beret topping his otherwise-smooth scalp. "And I 'didnae' expect you to be so old," she shot back. Maybe it wasn't a fair jab - the guy didn't look or move like a geezer, so his hair had probably made a premature exit - but she had to snuff out that protective look before it even started. No way was she going to get stuck with some evil variation on Big Brother.

She'd say one thing for this Duff guy - he wasn't eying her like a brother would. He studied her - head, toe, and everything in between. His glance didn't linger, but it was still enough to make Shego want to either change into sloppy sweats or kick him in the face, either one of which would probably insure she didn't get the job.

"What exactly are you lookin' for in an employer, lass?" Duff asked.

Shego could've recited the list if she were in a coma. "Smart. Evil. Has a plan to basically doom the world. Someone who can look me in the eye," she added pointedly. That went on the list, starting now.

To Duff's credit, his pink cheeks turned even pinker, and he looked away. "Come in, come in," he said, stepping back and wafting an arm into the castle.

Shego followed him in, doing her best not to curl her lip at the surroundings. It was cold enough to freeze your teeth together in there, but she _still_ got the impression of humid, damp moss every time she passed a corner, even though they were all bone-dry. She selected a low-slung couch to perch on and squinted darts at Duff so he wouldn't get any crazy thoughts about joining her on it.

He didn't, sinking onto a chair instead and staring into the fireplace that looked like it hadn't been lit since the fifteenth century. "Does it matter what to you _what_ that plan is?" he said.

Shego shrugged. "I guess not. Not as long as it does some major damage and puts us on top. And makes the do-gooders run around like a bunch of decapitated chickens. Yeah, I'd be good with just about anything." She squinted even harder. "Why? What's your plan?"

Duff cleared his throat and spread his arms like he was waiting for her to fly to the edge of her seat. If that was what he were after, he was gonna be there a _long_ time. "I plan" - it came out as "Ah plaun" - "to cover the entire world in grass, creating one gigantic golf course!"

He punctuated that with a fond gaze at the bag of clubs leaning lazily against the fireplace.

Shego stared, not caring at all how far her lower lip was hanging down. "That is _literally_ the stupidest thing I've ever heard."

Even she was sorta surprised by the extra-strength barb in her words. Hurt flashed across Duff's face. Five years ago, Shego might've felt sorry for him.

Now she did NOT have time for any more oozing scabs of lameness.

"I mean, seriously, a _golf course_?" Shego flung her hands in the air. "How is that gonna inspire fear in anyone? I mean, unless they're really, _really_ obsessed with their handicap?"

Duff met her eyes again, with such obvious effort Shego had to roll hers. "Isnae an issue of terrorizing the populace, lass. It's a revenge plot!"

His voice rumbled bitterly, and Shego saw a sliver of hope. She could get behind revenge. "Revenge for what?" she asked, with a heavy side dish of _this-better-be-good_.

Duff flipped a switch, flooding the room with a whopping twenty watts of light, just enough to cast Shego's bladed shadow on the wall. She loved the look of it. His head went down in some kind of tragedy, which only upped Shego's appetite for some of that.

He didn't exactly deliver. What came out was, "They banned me from every golf course in the world! Includin' mini-golf. They didnae want to watch me trounce them every day, couldnae handle the humiliation" - Duff's hands wrapped around the nearest club's neck and seemed to choke his own words off.

A Scottie dog hopped up to Shego, gave her a warning bark-growl, and then trotted away on legs so stubby he practically had to hop. Not exactly the poster child for an attack dog.

Shego would've laughed if her hackles hadn't been stirring. "That's your tragic backstory? Boo-hoo, so you can't play at golf courses anymore! I mean, it's not like you don't have plenty of grass out here to play."

An angry flush traveled up from Duff's beard, extending toward the forehead that never stopped. "They said I was banned for 'excessive displays of temper'!"

"And obviously that's not true at all," Shego said dryly. If the dude kept going like this, he was gonna send himself into cardiac arrest before too long.

"It was jealousy, was what it was!" Duff slashed a finger through the air toward Shego, and she watched everything on him grit down almost frighteningly. "And I'd watch that smart mouth o' yours if I were you, missy!"

Shego thought about sprawling a leg across the couch just to show she wasn't intimidated, but it seemed too Catwoman-come-hither. "Why? What kind of weapons do you have?" she said in the same tone the people on TV used to ask if a job offered paid vacation.

Duff grinned again, somewhere between crazed hyena and genuine supervillain. "Exploding golf balls."

Shego did laugh now. "Yep. Nothing sends the public running like a two-inch ball combusting." She could just imagine it having about as much firepower as those kiddy fireworks Hego bought for the Fourth of July.

"Would'ya care for a demonstration?" Duff said.

There was no way to _stop_ laughing at this point, taking in all five-foot-seven of him, with the kilt, the beret, and the beard that was probably the most dangerous thing about him. A club dangled with easy authority between his fingers, like he could bogey the world into submission.

"Sure, go right ahead. Knock yourself out."

Shego leaned lazily back on her elbows as Duff found a golf ball with a strip of electronic red across its surface, tossed it into the air, and then slammed it with the head of that club - faster than Shego had expected - and straight toward her. Laziness went out the window. Shego didn't care how feline she appeared as she arched right up off the couch and ricocheted off the nearest wall just soon enough to avoid the ten-foot blast that followed.

Okay. So they worked.

 _Not my biggest priority right now._

"Are you CRAZY?" Shego reined in her pitch until it was a point to rival Duff's beard. "You could've hit me! I get it that you guys are all 'bad-to-the-bone,' but it doesn't mean you can just white-out everything upstairs! You don't aim explosives at people you want as employees! That's, like, preschool-issue obvious!"

"You asked for a demonstration, and that's what I gave ya." Duff's fists swung like roller-coaster cars at his sides. "Can I help it if you got in the way?"

"Can I help it if you're a moron?" Shego replied.

She lifted herself to her feet and stomped toward the door, relieved that the terrier took one look at her and dove for cover. Shego wasn't a huge animal person, but it wouldn't have improved her mood any to scorch somebody's innocent dog. "Look, I think this interview is over," she tossed over her shoulder.

"Good luck findin' a job, then, lass!" Duff said. "Because yer going'ta need it."

Shego didn't even glance back at him as she zapped a burst of plasma backward - _just to remember me by_.

Only once she was in Hench's helicopter did she shove both hands back through her bangs and groan from the soles of her boots. All right, so the exploding golf balls _were_ halfway decent. Too bad Killigan wasn't. Even minus the unforgiveably cheesy golf gimmick, that bad an aim plus that bad a temper equaled that bad a boss.

Whoever she wound up working for, he would HAVE to be less high-strung than that.

* * *

Shego had thought an interview couldn't _possibly_ go any worse than that.

It was one of the few times she'd underestimated how much life could suck.

She'd give this Professor Dementor guy props for having a lair that was a pain in the tail to find. After that one night her senior year, Shego could personally confirm you could find your way to Go Tower from halfway across town, tipsy, at 3 AM.

The lair she eventually located was as squarish and barely-off-the-ground as the man who opened the door to her. He greeted her like a Disneyland tour guide, complete with the outswept hand and the too-kind-to-be-real-smile that still managed to hide something sinister underneath. It seemed promising.

That was the high point of the interview.

"Vy, Miss Shego!" the man said. His pitch would've been scraping against the ceiling if he hadn't been carefully controlling it. "A pleasure! I've been vaiting! Please, enter mine LAIR!"

Shego followed his lead. Her nose wrinkled, and not from the funky-smelling lair. Something about that "Miss" had reeked of patronization. She was gonna have to get that taken care of right away.

Did all of Hench's registered villains have self-image issues because of their height? For the second time that day, Shego glanced down at the top of a head, only _this_ head was firmly encased in some metallic mask that was probably _meant_ to look creepy and _not_ like he'd been strapped with headgear in preparation for some major oral surgery. "It's just Shego. You must be Professor Dementor," she said, as coldly as she could.

Dementor smiled even brighter, outdoing Killigan's pretty-much-worthless bulbs. Even his mustard-yellow skin seemed to glow. "Jah, zat is who I am! And I stand posed on ze BRINKING of VORLD DOMINATION!"

Okay, she'd add a few more points for somehow being able to maintain even a scrap of menace with the whole mutilated-English thing. Shego only had to swallow a low-grade snicker.

Dementor led her down a hallway lined with wicked-looking machines. Some of them she'd seen in the HenchCo catalogs, but the ones he stopped to gloat over had to be Dementor-designed. They looked harder to operate than that stick shift Hego had once insisted she learn how to drive, but it didn't seem like you'd need a PhD to cause some major destruction with them. Shego felt a grin form on her own lips.

The rest of the lair was pretty swanky, too - and still refreshingly cool and impersonal. Crystal chandelier in the main room. A bubbling fountain in the straight-out-of-a-spa break room. Kitchen countertops polished to a shine - if they'd ever suffered a spill, they weren't telling.

 _Now, see, THIS is why I got into the villain business._

Dementor eventually offered her a chair as soft and velvety as a good powder brush. His own chair rested his arm next to a scattered pile of envelopes and pushed him a couple extra inches off the floor. Yup, that would be the Napoleon complex kicking in, all right.

"So, Miss Shego -"

Again with the "Miss."

"- vhat has brung you to the step of mine door? Vy are you interested in a career in villainHOOD?" Dementor said.

Shego's brothers stampeded into her mind and back out again. Nope, word about them wasn't getting out to anyone. They weren't worth blaming anyway.

"Are you _kidding_?" Shego said instead, waving her arms at every expensive thing in the room. "Look at this place! I mean, it's not exactly like you're living in squalor here!" She pulled her legs up into a bow on the chair in front of her and added, with composure she didn't even have to fake anymore, "I like the good stuff. Plus, I like to steal things, and I like to beat people up."

" _Vonderbar_!" To Shego's horror, Dementor flicked some where-did-those-come-from tears out of the corners of his eyes. "Ohhh, is beautiful. Is so nice to see today's generation be interesting in the VILLAINY!"

 _Today's generation._ As if she should have been wearing Mary Janes and a Lamb Chops skirt.

"And Shego, you haff come to ze correct PLACE!" Dementor said. "No von alive can match the grandiose of Professor DEMENTOR! Zee little people" -

Shego cleared her throat to mask a snort.

" - zay see only gadgets and gizmos and zilly little TRINKETS when ze look at us, because they are too STUPIDER ZAN US!"

Put that in correct grammar, and Shego would've had to agree.

"But zat vill play right into our handses! Together, ve vill doom ze vorld to chaos and rule vatever is left!"

Dementor's compact little arms wouldn't fling far enough out from his body to reach Mego's levels of drama-queen. There were no tears now, just a wicked gleam that showed crossing him could be fatal. This was no cowardly little Go City villain who whined out his demands.

This was a bold dude who knew what he wanted and was prepared to do anything to get it.

Shego was impressed, though she forced herself not to show it. "Sounds pretty legit," she said, feeling the zing of plasma just waiting to be unleashed. "So, I'd like to talk to you about - "

"How much you think you are vorth getting ze PAY, _jah_?" Dementor leaned forward - the only word for his expression was _merry_. "How does a quarter of a million dollars a year SOUND LIKE?"

For about the first time in six months, Shego's jaw dropped. "You're joking," she blurted.

"Ah, I am good at ze telling of jokes, but zat is not now!" Dementor said. "You said it yourself, Miss Shego - I am not exactly living in ze SQUALMS! Is a _gorgeous_ paycheck, is it NOT?"

The phrase was "handsome," - which Shego would've told him, if his eyes hadn't stuck on her when he said "gorgeous." Her brain ran _a quarter of a million dollars a year_ through a few times and convinced her it was just a coincidence.

"That. . . sounds. . . awesome," Shego had to admit. She grinned back at him and rolled her fist out so he'd have a better view. "And now -"

"Zen it is SETTLED!" Dementor cried. "You vill begin ze work as mine secretary right AVAY!"

 _What. The._

Shego rose to a stand where she towered over him, even in his glorified booster seat. "Secretary?" she sputtered.

" _Jah_. I haff ordered your COSTUME all zee ready!"

Dementor snapped his fingers, and a man in a gray suit the color of an elephant - with the size to match - scurried into the room and presented Dementor with a few threads of white fabric. Dementor fanned it out in the air, and all thoughts disappeared from Shego's head in the static of sheer rage.

That thing was beaded and spangled and cut just decently enough to stay on. It looked just like something for one of the women in comic books, what little fabric there was embracing their curves as if their bodies were magazine perfume samples instead of deadly weapons. Hego would have been foaming-mad, and for once Shego wouldn't have blamed the big lunkhead.

Not that she was a prude by a long shot. But the intentions here were _so_ obvious that Shego wanted to puke all over Dementor's nice varnished floors.

Especially when he gave her that look again - the bold look of a man who knew exactly what he wanted. Shego decided she preferred the coward-type.

She _did_ snatch the floss-suit away from him, throw it to the floor, and grind it under her heel. "Okay - let's get a few things straight," Shego said. "I didn't apply for a job as a secretary. And if you think I'm gonna wear that, you really are demented, _Demence_!"

Dementor's mouth fell open. "How - how did you know -"

Shego had to imagine herself prying that stupid helmet off his head with a can opener before she could get her voice calm enough to answer. "Saw it on your mail. You shouldn't leave it lying around, _Demence_."

"All right, all right." Dementor took in a breath, one that took enough time for him to be reconsidering, and for a second Shego was _actually_ hopeful. "You vant to be von of mine hench...peoples instead, zen?"

Shego didn't miss how uncomfortably long it took him to say the last part of that. She had no answer.

"Vell, zat can be rearranged!" Dementor said. "I can alvays use another HENCHPERSON! I would just haff to purchase a new outfit for you, since none of their spares vould be fitting for you. . ."

His gaze wandered again when he said that. Shego clocked him a good one, right on his goateed chin, about the only place not protected by his mask.

The mustard-skin burned red, but Shego didn't get the sense that she should be worried. This guy was too much of an old-fashioned chauvinist to strike back against a member of the so-called weaker sex.

She thought about telling him exactly where to go, but she knew she'd only end up sounding like the resentful teenager that he was obviously seeing her as.

Instead, Shego hiked Dementor up by the back of his red coat-type thing and pinned it to the back of his mini-throne. "Look, I'd love to help you conquer the world. But I'm not going to be just another assistant, and I won't be expendable, and I won't be your pretty face! And if we're gonna work together, you absolutely HAVE to understand that."

Dementor nodded, the mask not even budging, like it was cemented on. "Of course, of course, Miss Shego! Ve can work zis out, pretty pleasing. . ."

The hand he placed on her arm felt like a snakeskin, and Shego karate-chopped it away. "Yeah, you _better_ understand that!" she said, as if he hadn't said a word, because as far as she was concerned - he hadn't. "Because I can fight like somebody from the WWE - and I can do _this_!"

Shego flexed her wrist-muscle, and the plasma spiraled out her fingertips. It hardly took any effort at all by now. Dementor's face was draining of mustard, but not in fear. More like glee.

What was _wrong_ with this guy - besides everything?

Dementor breathed something in German that was either sacred or profane. "I did not know you could do zat..." he said.

"No, you didn't." Shego chopped her arms over her chest. "Because you never bothered to ask."

With a shake of her hair - a flip would put her back in the angry-teen category - Shego turned and stormed out of the second lair of the day. Unlike Duff, Dementor called after her, begging her to come back. Like _that_ was ever gonna happen. She let the door slam itself shut behind her, hopefully hard enough to knock one of those priceless picture frames off the wall.

Shego threw herself back into HenchCo's helicopter and dug her fingers into her bangs again. A hideous, watery feeling gathered in her chest, the way it always had back when she used to still cry. There was nothing to cry about, though, and everything to scream and punch and be livid over. _That_ was what was welling up inside her.

What did she have to _do_ to be taken seriously around here? This was the '90s, for Pete's sake! Shouldn't the Gaston type just go extinct already?

Shego raked her glove-claws down the helicopter's dashboard and growled to herself. _Sidekick_ actually had a better ring to it now, compared with _secretary_ and the totally-down-the-nose _henchperson_ , which wasn't even a freakin' word.

But whoever her new boss was - if she found one - whatever he wanted to call her, he could NOT rub any of those terms in.

* * *

There was some Frugal Lucre guy listed next. Maybe the fact that the address given directed her to a _duplex_ in some dinky little town called Middleton should've tipped Shego off.

But, hey, after watching a bunch of supervillains try to one-up each other with their lairs like it was some kind of peeing contest, it was kinda nice to see somebody hiding in plain sight. It gave Shego a flicker of hope - kept in check by the Go-City-level-of-cheesy name.

So she wasn't _exactly_ surprised when the dude who answered the door was basically a younger, dark-haired version of the Mathter, complete with the spastic-looking face and the budding gut that came more from a slouch than anything. At least he wasn't sporting some tacky supervillain costume - just jeans and a high-necked T-shirt. His woolly-caterpillar eyebrows went up when he saw Shego.

" _You're_ Shego?" he said - straight through his nose. There was no leer within a hundred miles. No pickup line primed to shoot her way.

No, this guy sounded as if he'd opened the door to find a Pixie Scout hawking muffins.

Shego bit out a laugh so she wouldn't bite HIM. "And you must be Frugal Lucre?"

"Yeah. Why don'tcha come -"

He didn't get further than that before Shego elbowed herself in right past him. The place looked more like a waiting room than a villain's hideout - rosy cushions everywhere, fading wallpaper, soft-serve chairs that seemed designed to put an anxious patient at ease. Shego quirked a look at Lucre.

Lucre grinned in response. "My lair's downstairs," he said.

'Kay. So he rented the upstairs out to some little old lady. Not _too_ weird for a guy who practically advertised himself as a tight-fist - but, _dang_ , Lucre was losing coolness by the second.

Especially once he made for the stairs and thundered down them like a Saint Bernard puppy. Shego rolled her eyes and followed him at a cat's pace. Once you hung around stupid long enough, the saunter started to come pretty naturally.

Lucre _did_ gain back some points once Shego actually saw the basement. For as narrow a space as he'd had to work with, he'd done a decent job of fixing it up. It was painted an angrier red that obviously didn't give a hoot if it raised people's blood pressures. A cheapy, threadbare fishing net was taped by its four corners to the ceiling so that it hung down in a pouch. An old TV sat against the back wall, connected by a few nerd-tubes to a computer about as huge and obsolete as a woolly mammoth. The walls were overrun by posters of that one geeky guitar-player who used all kinds of fancy tech to disguise the fact that he couldn't have carried a tune in a shopping bag.

Not too shabby - not worth a compliment, either. Not after Shego had seen what even the tiniest scrap of praise did to guys like Killigan and Dementor. There was no way in heck she was gonna act impressed over some _basement_.

" _This_ is your lair?" Shego asked.

Lucre's chest poked out a bit and then fell back into place. "It's more a base of operations, really. I know it's not nearly good enough to qualify as a _real_ lair - not one of those grande-size ones - "

 _Using Bueno Nacho talk. Well, that bodes well._

"- but it's the best I can afford right now."

 _Oh joy - even better._

Shego attempted to flash a smile. Whether it worked or not, it felt good to have an excuse to bare her teeth at him. "Right now? So, you've got some kind of plan to move up in the works?"

It'd be hard to move _down_.

Lucre practically glowed and his whole body sprang an inch or two forward. Before he could open up and spill out what he was obviously _dying_ to tell her, the basement door swung open again and filled with a middle-aged shape. "Francis?" someone called down.

 _Francis? Who the heck is_ Francis _?_

It belonged to a woman who scuttled herself down the steps to clasp her hands together at Lucre's elbows. "Francis, you didn't tell me you had a friend over!" If the wink she was aiming at Shego was meant to be sly, it came about a half-mile short of reaching it. "And such a pretty girl, at that."

Shego ground her jaw down so hard she blurred out her own hearing.

The landlady shooed her hands around like she could clear away the air she'd given off with those last two sentences. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I know. I'm a cool mom. I'll just stay right upstairs and let you kids have your fun."

Shego jerked her neck in Lucre's direction. His head was bent toward the carpet, his skin blazing like a bad case of measles.

She. Was. His. Mom.

Shego wasn't sure whether she was about to laugh or cry, and she pressed her lips together so she couldn't decide.

Mrs. Lucre waved and headed back to the stairs. Part of Shego wanted to follow her back up and show herself out. This was deal-breaking-pitiful.

Then again, it'd been a long time since she'd had the chance to embarrass somebody this way. . .

First step was pretending nothing had happened. She hadn't been a little sister her entire eighteen-plus years without picking up a FEW tricks.

Shego cleared her face of any expression except a wide smile. "So - about that super-impressive plan of yours? I'm waiting to be impressed."

Even though Lucre was almost a dark enough red by now to match the walls, he managed to nod. "Hmmr - oh - yeah. Uh - you ever heard of the Internet?"

The sarcastic retorts pretty much wrote themselves:

 _No, I've been living under a rock._

 _Yeah, I think I got an e-mail about it the other day._

 _No, never - do tell. Is it an actual net?_

 _Yeah. Have you ever heard of a phonograph?_

Shego selected the last one and delivered it with a snort. It was only good for a "Huh?" from Lucre.

"Never mind." Shego sliced the air with her own hand. "Keep going. This is gonna be good."

"Well, a lot of people are pretty dependent on the Internet these days," Lucre said, his voice dropping like he was about to give her Bill-Gates-approved insider tips. "They'd go crazy without it. That's why I'm planning to release a virus that'll yank everybody's modems out of service and get a pretty hefty ransom, ya know?"

Okay. So he was going to hold the entire Internet hostage.

Shego took another significant glance at the straight-out-of-the- _Twilight-Zone_ model in the corner. "And of course you have that virus all prepped and ready to go?"

"Well, ah, no." This time, Lucre didn't seem embarrassed at all as he shrugged. "I'm still puttin' the finishing touches on it. I'd be done earlier if I didn't have to put in my forty hours a week, ya know?"

"Community service?" Shego said - now she was just short of begging the guy to at least have a misdemeanor against him.

"Nah. At Smarty Mart. I'm a checkout clerk."

 _Why?_

"But that's what I need a sidekick for, ya know?" Lucre said.

"Ya know, you end every sentence with 'ya know.' Ya know?" Shego said.

Lucre didn't have an answer. He rubbed his jaw while a blank stare formed. "I'd love a sidekick. Every good villain needs a sidekick. It's just that I was expecting, ya know - "

"A man," Shego finished for him. Her gaze was now locked on the arms he had rolled up in front of him. If he confirmed it, she was gonna rip off a handful of forearm hair. It wouldn't be hard.

"Well, maybe not _exactly_ a man, but not really a woman." Lucre said it like the bad logic was painful to get out. "I mean, I was plannin' on a sidekick living here, and my mom would freak if I had a girl move in with me. I mean, especially because - you're - you're so young."

 _Whoa-ho-ho, no. I didn't come here to be patronized by Mr. Still-Nicking-Myself-With-My-Razor._

Shego didn't say a word. She just leveled her eyes at him, feeling them turn to stones right on cue.

Lucre's own eyes were squinted almost shut, just adding to the impression that he was about to pass a kidney stone. "I mean, are you even old enough to buy alcohol?" he said.

"Are you?" Shego replied, and not in the tone that Hego was always telling her to "reel in." It had been getting flatter and colder with each backwards supervillain she'd met, and now - now she couldn't hear anything but frost in it. "I mean, will your mommy let you?"

The red rose up to Lucre's hairline again. At least he wasn't a screamer. His words shivered when he said, "Ya know, I ordered a martini at the bar-and-grill last week. It wasn't too bad a martini, either. The little olives in there gave it such a -"

"Would you shut up for like half a second?" Shego said, still so calmly she was almost giving herSELF the creeps. "Yeah, I'm young, but that tends to come in _handy_ in a bodyguard. That way I can put a Global Justice agent in a leglock without throwing out a hip or something."

Light flickered its way back behind Lucre's eyes. "That's a good point," he mused. "A very, very good point. You're smart, Shego. I like that. I like that a lot."

"Thanks." Shego felt a smirk taking shape. "Wish I could say the same about you."

And - whoosh, right over the head. Lucre just kept nodding and said, "So, what are your wages?"

Shego's nails went rigid under the blades in the fingers of her gloves. "How much can you pay me?" she asked, leaning her weight against one wall.

Lucre pulled a calculator from one pocket and started punching keys. "Well, lessee. How much is minimum wage these days? Four dollars an hour? Five?"

"Are you _kidding_?" Shego forced her sole to stay in a nonchalant prop and secretly hoped to tear a few posters with it. "I got paid more than that for baby-sitting!"

The dude actually smiled without a _hint_ of embarrassment. Even regret would be stretching it. "I'm sorry, Shego," Lucre said. "But I'm kind of on a tight budget right now. Gotta make every penny count."

Shego closed her eyes and waited for the anger to body-slam her. Instead, it rolled down her spine, straightening her out and standing her taller. "Fine. You count your pennies. And I'll get going so you won't have to worry about Mommy Dearest grounding you."

Even to herself, she sounded like the walking dead. _And I actually kind of love that._

Well, as much as she was loving anything at this point.

Shego didn't even bother to say good-bye to the mama who waved at her again on Shego's way out. The put-him-in-his-place thrill was already dissipating as she scratched the third name out on her list. Another bomb. Not a good sign.

The only thing even remotely comforting was that "Francis" hadn't been some sort of creeper the way the other two had. And he had some bare-bones creativity - Shego had to give him that.

When and if he ever grew up, Lucre might actually wind up in the local paper. There were people who were desperate enough for work to go bodyguard any villain who'd ever had an arrest warrant out on him.

Thankfully, that didn't include her yet. The _last_ thing Shego wanted was to wind up working for some cheapskate mama's boy.

* * *

"Greetings, Miss. You are Shego, I presume?"

Shego plastered both palms to her mouth and actually bit down on one of them to keep from screaming with laughter. Or maybe just plain screaming.

Falsetto Jones had made a pretty good first _visual_ impression. More refined than Killigan, Dementor, and Lucre combined, from the sides of his symmetrically receding hairline to the mustache that looked like it'd been sketched in with a fine-point Sharpie to the tidy fold of his hands at his waist. Unfortunately, that had gone down the flush pipe soon as he'd said two syllables.

Calling that voice high-pitched was like saying Death Valley could get kinda warmish in the summer. It wasn't your everyday tenor, or the jabber of some middle-school kid waiting to take the plunge into adulthood, or even Dementor's fury-edged screech. It wasn't ridiculous or unimpressive or even obnoxious. It was just. . . wrong.

Oh, yeah, Shego knew what "falsetto" meant, but she'd been banking on it being some kind of street name.

"You're Falsetto Jones?" Shego asked, half-hoping she was wrong.

"Guilty as charged." The words were said with so much dignity, you could almost ignore that they squealed out like a junky set of brakes.

Still, if Falsetto were anything like his supervillain buddies, he was probably already pegging her as a shallow little minx. The designer bag Shego was shouldering suddenly felt as blarin' obvious as a bloodstain on somebody's best linen napkins. So the dude had a wussy voice - big deal. Wasn't _his_ fault.

Falsetto gave her a puzzled look. Shego knew her almost-laughter wasn't showing on her face, and her struggle hadn't either. She'd caught a glimpse of her reflection in the helicopter's glass doors on the way over here, and all of that stuff had washed off like cheap makeup.

Finally.

"Yeah, I'm Shego." Shego followed him into the even-more-posh-than-Dementor's foyer he invited her to enter and had her first question out almost before she'd made contact with the tweed chair Falsetto offered her. After three strikes, there was no way she was letting him talk first. "So - what do you do for a living?"

Falsetto moved his hand-fold to rest under his perfect peak of a chin. "I breed dogs."

Figured. He was about up in their hearing range.

 _Okay, the non-shallow thing can kick in any time now._

"Charming." Shego willed her lip not to lift. The sarcasm was bad enough, though she was on the brink of just not caring anymore. "What kind of dogs?"

"Oh, well, many breeds. All purebreds, of course. Champion show dogs." Falsetto broke the fold to snap his fingers at one of the two men, whose muscle-squat necks were the only things preventing their heads from bonking the ceiling, flanking his chair bookend-style. "Bring in Sir Francis Drake."

 _Uh, not to be a pain, Jonesy, but he's a little bit dead._

Whatever breed that dog they brought in was, he was totally Falsetto's canine counterpart, right down to the smooth, proud-looking forehead and the snout stuck straight up in the air. Shego had to keep as tight a grip on her laugh as Muscle Man did on the leash.

Sir Drake was better behaved than Killigan's little mutt, Shego would give him that. He padded over to Falsetto's side and plunked himself down more regally than she'd known a dog could.

"I've been an authority in the dog-pageantry world for over a decade." Falsetto looked at her more closely, and Shego could almost _see_ him deciding not to tack on that she must've been in third grade back then. "I officiate nearly every competition where I haven't entered one of my own dogs."

And probably some where he had.

"Wow." Shego exaggerated the word like that job _didn't_ sound like the biggest snore-fest in the world. She considered sprawling a leg onto the couch next to her - except there was always the way that pushed her jumpsuit closer to her figure. That was so NOT the effect she was going for. "But what I _really_ meant is - what do you do for an _evil_ living?"

Falsetto's smile was as thin and prim as the rest of him, but there was no mistaking the shiftiness behind it. "I am, rather ironically, what you might refer to as a 'cat burglar,'" he said.

Shego knew she was grinning, too, poking her head out of the bubble of blackness she'd spent the past eight-or-so years building around herself. "Yeah? What do you burgle, exactly?"

"Jewels," Falsetto said. "Hench doesn't give out my number to just anyone. I try to keep my involvement in the supervillain world a secret, as I'm sure you can understand."

Heck yeah. A slick, shady class act who ripped off rubies in his spare time? Even one who sounded like Alvin the Chipmunk? It was almost too good to be true.

Shego pulled her nail file from her leg pouch and dropped her eyes half-shut so she wouldn't come across as _too_ eager. "You need a partner?"

"Absolutely." There was something so complacent about the way Falsetto closed his own eyes and tipped his head to meet the wingback. It skulked right over Shego's reserve."Oh, mark my words, I love the thrill of the heist. But it will be such a weight off my shoulders to know someone is looking after the dogs while I'm away."

The blackness crashed back down on Shego.

It _was_ too good to be true. Shego felt her cheeks swamping with color, and she forced them back to their usual green-white before she spoke again. "I'm sorry - what?"

 _Please let me have heard him wrong._

"They need to be brushed every day," Falsetto went on, as if Shego had already signed on the dotted line. "And the poodles need to be shaved once a week. There's the biweekly bath. And, of course, any little messes that need to be cleaned up."

" _Messes_?"

"Oh, they're all very well trained, Shego, don't worry. But even the best of them sometimes have little accidents, especially the young ones. Dogs will be dogs, right?"

 _Right. While you're out filching diamonds, I get a job scooping dog doo._

Shego wanted to call him every cuss word in the English language - and some of the Spanish ones she'd taken it upon herself to learn in Spanish 101 junior year. But that wouldn't have gotten her what she really needed, and that was fast turning into how she weighed her decisions anymore. She stood stiffly to give herself the height advantage.

"I'm _not_ a pooper-scooper." Shego's words came out so icy and metallic a kid could've frozen their tongue on them. "That's about the farthest thing in the _world_ from why I came here. I have some real-world skills of my own, and they don't include shaving poodles or pampering dogs you name after dead wannabe explorers."

"We'll pay you quite nicely -"

"Hup-up-up, no." Shego hacked her thumb and index finger together to shut the moron up. "Thank you. Not the point. I'm a pretty decent cat burglar myself, and I'd love to help you out with _that_."

Shego could've slapped herself, glove-blades and all, for the hint of desperation she could hear peeking through. It took very little effort to turn her voice in a tightly controlled whip now - it was _keeping_ it there that was the problem. It was all Falsetto needed to compose his face back into smiling snottiness.

"That's a kind offer, Miss Shego, but I have been in the burglary business long enough to consider myself something of an expert," Falsetto said. His squeak oozed like a grape somebody was stepping on. "I have no need for assistance in that area."

 _Wanna bet, Alvin?_

"Then lemme sign on as a bodyguard," Shego said instead. "There've gotta be some pretty rough villains out there - "

\- _even if I haven't had the pleasure of meeting one yet_ -

" - and someone to have your back would be a way better investment than a dog groomer." Shego leveled the nail file at him. He wouldn't catch her pleading now.

"I'm sorry, Miss Shego," Falsetto said, his eyes so full of pity that Shego had the ugly impulse to gouge them out. "But as you can see, I already have several personal bodyguards."

He nodded toward the Hulk-men. One of them grunted and the other said, "Yo."

 _You have_ two _._

Shego took several steps backward and let her hands rest against her hips. "Oh, I get it. I see. And because I'm a woman -"

"No!"

"- and I'm young - "

"No!"

" - and 'cuz you think I'm pretty -"

"No!" Falsetto cried one last time. He'd flattened his whitening hands on either armrest, breathing just a little too heavily. A man frantic to preserve his reputation.

Did Shego feel sorry for him?

 _Is the pope Jewish?_

" - you think I'm just around to be your little handmaiden. Your squeak is my command," Shego finished.

She waited for a squeaky torrent of insults, but Falsetto had recovered remarkably fast, even if his cheeks still looked like a couple of fire hydrants. "I'm sorry, Miss Shego," he said, with all the emotion of a robot, for about the third time. "I don't believe this arrangement is going to work."

"I'm heartbroken," Shego said. "'Cuz I was really looking forward to scooping up dog poop." She reached over and scratched the furrier snob behind the ears. "See ya, Sir Frankie. I'm gone."

When Shego got back to the helicopter, she slammed her head down onto the steering gear, over and over, until she was wearing its outline on her skin. Had these guys all crawled out of the same cesspool? What was WRONG with them?

Or was there something wrong with _her_?

Shego shook her head at her own washed-out reflection. Nah, the only thing wrong with her was that she was dead-tired and could handle, oh, say, _absolutely nothing else_ today. It was getting dark anyway. Time to get back to the hotel and call it a day.

Right after she scratched Falsetto Jones off the list she carried in her leg pouch - and added _No spoiled dogs_ to the makeshift one in her mind.

* * *

Now, Gemini's lair, Shego decided the next day, scored big on the hard-to-find front - literally underground and accessed through a maze of tubes that zigzagged through the soil. It still seemed like a _lot_ of unnecessary drama to Shego, and she felt kinda like a mole trying to wind her way through all those underground tunnels, but she could see how it'd creep the crud out of "heroes" like Hego, who assumed anything below sea level equaled certain death.

Shego jogged between two of the requisite huge, toned henchmen down the hall toward Gemini's office. Their heads didn't even come _close_ to brushing the high rafters. The whole place made Shego feel small, and at five-eight, that wasn't something she was used to.

Thank goodness it faded when she walked in and saw Gemini himself - not Dementor-runty, but definitely short enough to be dwarfed by the high-and-mighty chair all the mad-freak types seemed to favor. Its shoulders poked up at the edges and rolled together in the middle, same way his did, and his hands - one metallic, and the flesh-and-blood one looking just as hard - were cemented together on the desk in front of him. Professional but not uppity.

It was easy for Shego to sink down into the chair across from him. Easier still to squint at him out of the narrow slits that had become second nature to her. Nobody had that kind of power over you when they were squished down in your vision like that.

 _Go ahead. Wow me._

The room WAS pretty neat, actually - computer terminals carving their shapes into the shadows, and a looping dashboard around Gemini's desk that looked a little like a baby's walker, but obviously boasted some lethal firepower. Gemini bought up HenchCo products as if his bank account self-refilled. But somebody would have to work some serious magic to "wow" Shego anymore.

"Hello. You must be Shego." Gemini adjusted the eye patch whose cord looped around the I-did-this-on-purpose brown disarray of his hair. "I trust you _did_ have some trouble finding the place?"

Twenty-four hours ago, that might have broken Shego into a grin. Now she just nodded emptily at him.

"Good, good," Gemini said. "That means we're still successfully hidden from the public eye." His mouth softened for a second. "Sorry for any inconvenience, but in a business as dangerous as ours, we don't want to advertise our location."

"Understood." Boy, was it _ever_ understood.

Gemini leaned forward and expertly executed a smirk. "Welcome to the W-E-E."

 _Okay, so that'll intimidate - uh, just about NO ONE._

"WEE?" Shego said in disbelief. "You mean like, 'wee, wee, wee, all the way home'?"

The space inside the edges of Gemini's trimmed-close beard reddened. "No, not at all like that. It stands for the Worldwide Evil Empire. The planet's foremost federation for crime and chaos."

He said it with the glee of a madman. Shego could get to like this guy.

Not that she was going to let _him_ know that. She kept the slits skewering right on him. "So what the 'we' in WEE do?"

Gemini gave her an amused glance, like he'd caught her humor and appreciated it. "Oh, everything from design superweapons to slash tires. We have scientists working 'round the clock developing new machines to help us rule the world - or just ruin the do-gooders' days."

A large part of Shego wanted to cry, _Sign me up now!_

She didn't, of course. "So what would _my_ job be around here?" Shego asked, firing up one hand so he'd pack away any ideas of putting her on laundry patrol before they could form.

Gemini's good eye startled, the only visible sign that Shego had more than likely just driven his heart rate up twenty notches. "Well - pretty much anything you want. As I said, we have scientists, we have statisticians, we have enforcers -"

 _Enforcers_. The word was good alternative rock music to Shego's ears.

" - or you can be part of our espionage team. We could always use another agent out there in the field," Gemini said. "I didn't even hear you slip in - so you'd make a very good spy."

What was _that_? An actual compliment?

 _More like flattery that'll get him nowhere_ , Shego reminded herself. She put the nail file in action again and said with all the boredom she could muster, "Who are we spying on?"

To her surprise, Gemini hunched over and leaned across the desk with the heel of his real hand cupped around his mouth. "G-L-O-B-A-L J-U-S-T-I-C-E."

"Global Justice?" Shego repeated.

And then somebody exploded into whimpers. It obviously wasn't Gemini, even though he _did_ drop to his knees, digging under his desk and practically cooing to whatever was under there. He came up holding a. . .

Dog?

Well, that was what Shego _guessed_ it was. She'd seen bigger rats. Its limbs weren't any thicker than a Barbie doll's, its tongue hung in a sideways pant, and its eyes were almost too bloated for its sockets. Add to the fact that the thing was trembling like a twig in a breeze and its ears were flattened against its scalp, and it was the most miserable-looking creature Shego had ever met.

Shego stared. " _What_ is _that_?"

Gemini straightened to an indignant height, two or three inches taller than Shego would've pegged him. "This is Pepe," he said. "My beloved Chihuahua."

Seriously - what was WITH the dogs?

"Pepe hates GJ as much as I do," Gemini said, stroking the thing's fur way too lovingly. "The words send him into a nervous panic. That's why we don't say them around here."

Un-stinkin'-believable.

"Pepe" squeaked higher than Falsetto. Stupid little dog was too pathetic to even glare at, so Shego shifted that over to the owner. "You aren't gonna expect me to clean up after him, are you?" she demanded.

The eyebrow that the patch didn't cover arched. "Certainly not," Gemini said. "Pepe's never taken to caretakers. He is my responsibility and mine alone. All I ask is that my employers not say -" he spaced an arm-length like it was a blank that shouldn't be filled in - "around him."

If Shego had rolled her eyes as hard as she'd wanted to, they would've flipped inside-out. Still, if that were the dumbest requirement Gemini had -

She did another iron-over of her face. Sure, Shego had heard of Global Justice - Hego talked about Dr. Director, their leader, in the same drooling way Mego mentioned Madonna - but of course the big dweeb had never gotten around to mentioning what _exactly_ it was they did. Gemini sounded like he'd been creepy-closely acquainted with them for years, and being the ignorant one in the room was never any fun.

"So - you're tired of GJ busting your chops all the time?" Shego said.

"Oh, much more than that." Gemini leaned forward again, metal fingers splaying on the desktop. "You see, I am Dr. Director's evil twin."

An image of the Wegos spread out and multiplied in Shego's mind for a mini-moment before she kicked them back out. _Twins_ , for Pete's sake.

"You're kidding," she said in the flattest voice yet.

"Never!" Gemini said. "My little sister thinks she's so big and important with her oh-so-powerful agency that she's head of." He kept going before the soon-to-be-teacher in Shego could call him out on ending with a preposition. "It's about time someone showed her there are others out there equal to her in power; others - dare I say - greater!"

Shego could only think of one thing to say. "Wait - 'little' sister? You're her twin."

"One twin still has to come out first!" Gemini sank back and set his bearded jaw and pulled the evil aura back down over the kid-grudge he'd been flashing.

Shego could have kept nagging him about it - it was a talent a "little sister" picked up early, especially with dumber-than-average brothers. But after the four circles of Hades that yesterday had been, her nag was as exhausted as an overstretched muscle. She didn't _want_ to have to nag anymore. She just wanted to find a halfway-decent person with a halfway-decent plan and get herself a half-decent job.

"Oh-kay, then," Shego began.

Before she could get any further, the door opened silently and in trooped two of the giant men, wearing strange Greek-looking symbols on their chests like they belonged to some kind of weird frat. The more-enormous one handed Gemini a paper, which he pushed across the desk toward Shego and tapped with his natural thumbnail.

"This is your contract," Gemini said. "Take a look."

Shego did, panning down past the sections on health insurance, life insurance, dental insurance, and tax rebates. Gemini offered maternity leave, a fact that left her just short of grinning. So having a woman on his payroll didn't sound so crazoid to Gemini.

 _*I accept my initial pay of $125,000 dollars a year._ That was only half of what Dementor had offered, but - dang.

 _*I pledge my service to the good of the WEE._

 _*I agree that I may be fired for any reason Gemini deems sufficient, and that he is in no way responsible for any physical or emotional injuries I may suffer in the process._

"Uh, 'scuse me?" Shego snapped her fingers together in front of Gemini's face. "Quick question here. How the heck would I get 'physically injured' from you firing me? Unless you fire me, I dunno, _out of a cannon_?"

The laugh building in Shego's chest died when Gemini's eyes took on a cold light, even as he soothed the ruffled fur on his Chihuahua's head.

One of the ginormous henchmen squirmed in place. "Uh, boss?" the other one said. "Could we have a moment with the interviewee in private?"

Gemini nodded. "Very well, Agent Beta."

So it _was_ Greek.

Only because the henchmen directed her to the back wall with nods of their own instead of touching her did Shego follow them. And even at that, she still started their huddle hissing, "You try to put the moves on me, and so help me I will rip our your - "

"No, no, Miss," Agent Beta interrupted her. "It's nothing like that. We just wanted you to know what 'firing' means to Gemini."

"Ye-ah?"

The other agent picked up right where Beta had left off - they were as in-sync as a pair of Olympic swimmers. "When someone fails horribly on an assignment, Gemini calls them into his office. You can't say no. You have to sit down. Then he activates an ejection mechanism on your chair, you fly into the air, and a parachute pops out the back for you."

Shego wasn't proud of how many times she had to blink to really grasp what they were saying. "And what happens to them then?"

"We don't know," Agent Beta said, face drawn up like he was in pain. "We've never heard from any of them again."

Shego's stomach wavered and she wished she were still in the office of some chauvinist who'd never DREAM of doing _that_ to "the weaker gender." That lasted about five seconds before the anger kicked in and seared at her.

Shego didn't even think about cussing this time. She just marched herself straight up to Gemini's desk, reached across the lump of papers he was studying, and ripped off his eye patch to reveal just what she'd expected to find underneath - a bloodshot-but-perfectly-fine eye.

There was probably a normal hand under that cyberspace one, too.

The agents gasped in unison. Gemini pawed for a button - Shego could guess what it did, but she was already out of the chair and pinning him in a chokehold.

"You were actually gonna launch me out the roof if I messed up on your stupid little vendetta against your sister, Cyclops? And you expected me to be okay with that?" she spat.

Gemini was struggling - he was stronger than he looked - but he still managed a sick little smile. "Agents should know their place - right?" he got out just before he wrenched his neck free of her grasp and aimed one of the steel fingers at her.

Shego didn't know exactly _what_ happened next in the flare of plasma and rage and pure killer instincts. Just that it ended with Gemini hanging by the seat of his pants off the giant pointer-arm he kept next to some kind of projector.

"Yeah, I know you think you're all Nick Fury," Shego said, "but -"

One of the agents actually had the guts to ask, "Who's Nick Fury?"

"Another lame-butt with an eye patch," Shego replied without missing a beat. "But lemme tell you something, Gemini - when you have a do-gooder for a sibling, all you can do is leave 'em behind in the dust. Otherwise they're always gonna be dragging you down, turning you into some kid pitching a fit. You gotta get as far away from them as possible if you're ever gonna make _any_ thing of yourself."

And before SHE could slip any heavier out of control, Shego flipped around and stomped out the office doors. She'd have to face the tunnels again, but better them than some sadist whose employees had a contractual obligation to let him kill them. Or whatever it was he did.

That definitely went on the list - at the top. Down at the bottom, she made a note to also add, _Yikes! I want an actual supervillain, not just some turd with a grudge. How petty can you get?_

* * *

White Stripe was the biggest bust of all, and it only took Shego about fifteen minutes to discover that.

In the first place, the guy screamed gimmicky so loudly, Shego had to double-check the address in her pocket to confirm she _hadn't_ been lured back to Go City. And his gimmick?

Skunks.

Seriously. White Stripe was dressed like one of the little stinkers, in a skinny black suit he wore like an Armani, complete with the white streak down the middle he was clearly so proud of. The falling-to-pieces wooden crates stacked around his abandoned warehouse "lair" were labeled, in too-precise handwriting, "Stink Bombs" and "Stink Spray." There was even a skunk-shaped balloon floating up around the fire escape - with its tail raised and everything. How gross was that?

Even with Aviarius, there were a few meat-eating birds with out-and-out weapons for beaks. But _skunks_? The stink factor barely overpowered the cuddly-cute factor.

And Shego had thought she'd been scraping the bottom of the loser barrel BEFORE. She was starting to suspect that there might not be a limit.

In the second place, this dude was old. Not creeping-toward-middle-aged like Dementor and Killigan. Actually _old_ , with hair the color of week-old slush and skin that Club Banana could've used for their new line of leather boots. He looked pretty spry for an old man, obviously took decent care of himself, but Shego couldn't quite get past the possibility of him having a heart attack when the police showed up.

And third place? Well, Shego had barely introduced herself when White Stripe sat her down on one of the creaky-looking crates and launched into extreme melodrama. He would _not_ shut _up_ about the revenge he was going to get against his sworn nemesis: the Fearless Ferret.

The Fearless Ferret was fictional. Guy had dementia. Waste of her time.

Yeah, it was sure as heck _Shego_ couldn't bring him around. She'd spent some time around nursing homes before - thanks to Hego and his gag-inducing servant's heart - and most of the folks there didn't react too kindly when you popped their dream bubbles. If this guy wanted to believe he was some comic-book villain reincarnated, let 'im. Meanwhile, _she'd_ find an employer who understood reality.

With any luck.

Somewhere around the third time White Stripe was recounting "The Great Stink-Bombing of '82" - where twelve people had to be taken to the hospital, nauseous and lightheaded - Shego held up her palms and said, "I'm sorry. This isn't gonna work." She could've sworn the snark-free flow of her voice belonged to someone else. "Good luck."

White Stripe blinked at her from behind a visible haze and then ushered her toward the door and bowed her out like the antiquity he was. There was no desire to hound him for that, no parade of old-geezer jokes in Shego's head, no need to purge her eyes of the skunk-suit.

In fact, as Shego left the warehouse, she was grabbed by the first bit of sympathy she'd felt in months. Too bad. Thirty years ago, he might've been a pretty neat guy to work for.

* * *

Dang, how did good guys _function_? Sympathy was heavier than carting around a backpack full of child development textbooks 24/7.

Shego cut it - and the evening - short after about two hours and flew herself back to the hotel. There was still one more name on her list, but she didn't trust herself with the flare in her chest - a lifelong companion, minus the tears it used to bring with it when she was little. If one more jerk-villain tried a pickup line on her, Shego just might hot-wire the nearest pickup _truck_ and run them down. More than once.

Not that that wouldn't have been satisfying - and looked pretty good on the ol' resume.

Shego slammed herself across the bed on her back and glared bullet holes into the ceiling. At least she wasn't sweltering under Hego's rule-following hand here. At least there was that.

There was still her essay on early cognition to write, too. That had to be better than the chapter she'd been assigned to read about how the brain worked in adolescence. As far as Shego could tell, it was all selfishness and hormones, and she'd had enough of both to last her until _she_ was ready for a nursing home.

Shego threw open the drawer, narrowly avoided yanking the thing off its hinges entirely, and snatched up her papers. She wrote with the detail of a soldier on the prowl for bombs, picking and scouring all the words before putting them down.

Still, with every scratch of her pen across the papers, the vision of herself, dressed in a respectable skirt-and-jacket set, holding a wooden pointer and teaching phonics to some nose-picking brats, got paler and paler. By the time Shego had stabbed her final period into place, all she could picture were her own hands, glowing and fiery and ready to chop somebody's block off. Her wrists trembled the way they always used to back in middle school before she lost control of her plasma - only on the worst possible occasions, too.

It charged Shego up enough to scan the essay for any major mistakes, plunk it back into the drawer, and head off to the bathroom to freshen up again. There was something strangely settling about slapping the shampoo on and then drowning it. When she left the squeezed-tight little bathroom, her body was following orders to the _letter_.

Wouldn't _that_ have shocked Hego right out of his Superman sneaks?

Shego roosted on the edge of the mattress again and pulled the now-pretty-battered list from her leg pouch, ticking off each name as she went. "Let's see - poster child for anger management, pervert, mega-geek, professional snob, psychopath, annnnd has-been." She drew the blackest line yet through White Stripe's name and knocked her skull back against the headboard. "Could somebody give me a BREAK here?"

She was feeling the dry-eyed burn again. Electronique would've called it her "inner villainness" or some cheesy thing like that. Shego just knew she'd found a new energy source.

Should come in handy for whatever was gonna happen tomorrow.

With a violent flick of the lamp's switch, Shego killed the lights, sucked her breath in between her teeth, and pushed it back out again. It came slower and easier than it had just last night. Stretching in the darkness, Shego ran through the closest thing to a positive thought she could muster:

 _Dr. Drakken, you'd better be spectacular._

 **~I got the "should know their place" line from Zorpox the Conqueror, of course. All credit and nacos to Zorpox.~**


	23. Joke's On You

**~Managed to squeeze this one in before the sinus infection laid me flat. :P Hope ya enjoy, and I'll have the next chapter up when I can.~**

The glass-paneled walls screamed _corporate_ while the fancy leather couches were bragging on how homey they were. Not to mention the various potted plants in their little globe-balls that attempted to bring an earthy air into the place.

There was only one inelegant thing in HenchCo's waiting room.

And it was her boss.

Drakken was hunched over the reception desk, railing out the kid behind it, face heat-blotched from the chin up. Anybody else would've taken the gracefully-curved seats and the carpet that could've been made from mink as an invitation to whisper - not Drakken. His current bellow was, "What do you _mean_ my membership has expired?"

The sigh that had been building in Shego's chest bowed out for a better option. "Well, gee, Dr. D," she said. "Sounds like it means your membership's expired." She directed phony blankness at the receptionist. "I mean, is that the message you were trying to get across?"

Shego had known this visit was doomed from the start. Drakken always walked into HenchCo as if he were about to score a sweet deal, and every time, without fail, he left in a slink, ponytail trembling over his collar. You'd think any decent scientist would have caught on to the pattern by now - but then again, it was _Drakken_.

They'd stepped into the waiting room, Drakken batting away at his contacts because Hench kept his "secret passageways" as dark as a seventeenth-century woodshed. Shego wondered just how accustomed Dr. D's eyes were to light, anyway. Cooped up in that cave of a lair all day? He probably shriveled like a vampire in the sunlight. Count Drakkula.

That was a mondo part of the whole problem. Even with the narrow stare he'd immediately worked himself into, Drakken looked about as cynical as a Disney princess.

Right now, he sent Shego a snicker-worthy glare and a predictable comment about her "lippiness." "Haven't purchased in over a year" - humph!" Drakken jabbed the counter every other word, until Shego was sure his little bird-bones would break. "What about that Ultrasonic Drill Slicer not six months ago?"

Shego flipped back through her memory to see if they'd ever really _had_ one of those. All of Dr. D's schemes-of-the-hour tended to run together after a certain point.

The secretary steepled his fingers together and gave Drakken a math-teacher look. ". . .You actually stole that."

Drakken flashed a sheepish grin all the way back to the perfect molars.

It didn't charm Desk Kid. He kept on going, saying they'd "done extensive research" - which Shego had figured out was overblown-villain-talk for "snooped around like a shrew" - into Drakken's expenses.

Well, it didn't take "extensive research" to figure out Drakken's bank account was shot full of holes. About the only way he could buy anything now was to charge it on a credit card bill he also couldn't pay, and he felt hilariously guilty about that.

Not much pure evil in THAT mad scientist's blood.

"And the one time in the past year you _did_ buy something, your check bounced," the receptionist continued. He coulda given lessons on how to NOT go off into a tangent when someone was totally ticking you off.

And Drakken coulda used some. Shego glanced up in time to see his cheeks blotch double-time. He was actually pretty sensitive about his lacking funds.

Go figure that.

Any second now, there'd be a _well-who-needs-your-stupid-company-anyway-I'll-show-you-all!_ punctuated by a stomp out of the room.

Shego sniffed under her breath. She'd never been especially attracted to HenchCo's prices herself, not to mention their proprietor's slick-hair-slicker-manners style, but even she had to admit you were paying for quality work. They had weapons that _didn't_ fall apart at the push of a button, vehicles that made the Batmobile look like a cheap kid's toy, and 3-D hologram projectors so that you could kill somebody from three continents away if that was your thing.

And, ya know, actual hired muscle. As opposed to Drakken's dorky henchmen who got asthmatic running up a flight of stairs. Right now, they were clustered in lumps around the room, oohing and aahing over the water cooler and the actual cone-shaped cups it dispensed. Apparently breaking news in Duh-Land.

Yeah, the closest Drakken had come to world domination all year was tying up the mayor of Denver in the back of an ice cream parlor. Check that - Shego had done the tying. Drakken had just taken care of the whole pace-'n'-boast thing.

But would he consider HenchCo's products might help? Did he _need_ them? Ohh-ho, no, not this bad boy.

The urge to scorch his backside was almost overpowering some days.

"You are bordering on insolence, _child_!" Drakken yelled. "Don't think I won't go right over your head and speak to your superiors!"

There was the tiniest of rustles from the general direction of the half-open office door. Jack Hench sat in his usual imperious position behind his mahogany desk. His eyes lifted slowly toward Drakken, gazed straight through him, and then slipped back down to his paperwork.

Drakken's usually hunched-over back came straight up as if a carton of starch had been dumped down his lab coat. His lip twisted in disgust-over-hurt, and Shego could see the stings of a thousand past insults glowing on his face.

"You _people_!" he said. "Ghh-nnngh-rakkk!"

And here came the warped syllables, tumbling out like Scrabble tiles spilled at random. He was either about to pitch a true mad-scientist tantrum or burst into tears. Either one of 'em would be ugly, but the second one he'd never live down.

Shego eased herself between Drakken's lanky frame and the boomerang-shaped desk and snagged his sleeve with the tips of her glove-blades. She loved to watch him make a complete fool of himself back at the lair, but out _here_ in front of people? Yeesh - she had a reputation to uphold, too. "Look, Dr. D," she said, "why don't you do your blood pressure a favor and just fill out his paperwork?"

Drakken squinted at her like he was stepping out of one of Hench's oooh-mysterious tunnels all over again. "But - but - but - but -"

And then, lo and behold, he seemed to figure it out for himself. He snatched the clipboard away from Desk Kid, retrieved a pen to stick behind his ear, looked around the room the same _why-is-everyone-here-not-obeying me?_ way he'd done with every room he'd ever set foot in, and stalked up toward the chairs formally lined up against one wall.

Shego was glad to get out of the receptionist's sight. If that kid leered in her direction one more time, Shego would smack him in the chops.

Dr. D, on the other hand, was basically invisible. Everyone passing through the room gave him one quick glance - the kind you'd give to somebody's disregarded tissue in the trash bin - and then darted their gaze away like the sight of him burned their eyes. Shego would've smacked them for that, too, but Drakken just slouched into the corner, probably not even noticing he'd hunched up his shoulders and put his puppy-dog face on.

He was pathetic.

Although the attack-dog-style growls he was giving off right now _might've_ scared off somebody who wasn't close enough to SEE it on him. As in, Drakken's legs had a thirty-second lead on Shego's and were skittering at top speed, and it still only took two strides to catch up to him. His pout moved just enough to poke out, "Sheesh, you steal five or six things, and you're branded a thief for life."

Shego didn't even try to work out why Drakken didn't _want_ to be branded a thief all of a sudden. Her Bachelor's was in Child Development, not Psychotherapy.

Instead, she leaned in and hissed, "Hey, it could be worse."

"How?" Drakken demanded.

"You could have been arrested. Hench can't risk calling the authorities. He's too much of a scumbag himself."

"What did you say?" That was Desk Kid, butting in again. Shego could almost hear his bleach-blondness whipping in their direction.

Without bothering to turn back around, Shego jammed a hand behind her back and lit it up.

She'd never heard such a cultured "meap" before. That was definitely going down as the highlight of her day.

It was true, though. Hench _had_ called in Kimmy before. Exactly once. She'd made it impossible to miss that she wasn't gonna be snowed by his I'm-performing-a-service-for-the-community act. One of the reasons the kid had Shego's reluctant respect, though she'd sooner shave her own head than admit it to anyone.

Drakken grunted as he chewed the cap of the pen and worked on squeezing his answers into the too-narrow-for-his-scrawl spaces. After she'd given up on becoming a teacher, Shego wouldn't have thought she'd ever see anyone write their name that painstakingly again.

She swung her gaze around the room. Hench actually had a mini-fountain on some end table next to the back wall. Of course. _Some_ thing had to soothe the customers back from the edges of a stroke once they turned over his six-figure price tags.

You had to say this for Hench - he turned the scumbag game into an art form.

Shego had just folded her grip around one of the _Villain_ magazines that Hench kept stacked on pretty much every piece of furniture when there was a ruckus at the counter that automatically jerked Shego's head to the left, to make sure Dr. D wasn't the one causing it for once.

He wasn't. It was a guy in a streamlined wetsuit who'd just emerged from one of HenchCo's tangle of hallways and hauled his scuba tank over to the desk. It wouldn't have surprised Shego if Hench had his own personal pearl diver, but the dude's face, red all the way up to the hood under an explosion of freckles, wasn't typical of HenchCo staff. And the volume he'd set himself at was _definitely_ not Hench-approved.

Shego allowed her eyes to widen just enough to throw a question at Drakken. He snapped up the connection and gave her back a huge, exaggerated shrug, stretching his neck so far across the currently-unoccupied chair on his left that Shego was just waiting for him to tumble, ponytail over boots, into the seat and bounce off to the ground. It was one of his best stunts.

"I'm here to collect my benefits," the guy was saying. Shego wondered what kind of villain he was. The nervous babble gave off more of a small-time-bank-robber air than anything else.

"And what benefits would those be?" the receptionist asked.

"Doggone you, my Villain Express benefits!" The man flung his arms forward. "Look, I've tried being patient here, but I submitted my application _three weeks_ ago and haven't heard a -"

"What's the name?" The receptionist's voice could've passed for a hostage negotiator's as he thumbed through the Rolodex on the counter.

The man did the I-can't-believe-I'm-dealing-with-this-moron arm-fling again. "Ivan," he snapped. "Hurricane Ivan."

Shego didn't even try to stifle her snort. Hego would've already been spouting cornball metaphors about the guy _looking stormy_ and _clearly ready to tear his way right up the coast_.

Then again, so would Dr. D.

Shego glanced at him to make sure that wouldn't be an issue. Nope. Drakken was in full curiosity mode, eyes bright, registering every change in the room with busy quirks of his eyebrow.

"Ivan, Ivan, Hurricane Ivan," Desk Kid said. He pulled out a card and tapped a few buttons on the computer - why did they even HAVE the Rolodex in the first place, then? - while Ivan shifted his weight and groaned as if he were being forced to stand in line at the ER with a busted appendix.

Shego would've cringed if she hadn't been enjoying the show. You had to keep a tight hold on yourself with Hench-and-Co, or they'd twist it all back around to blow back into your face. Drakken was Exhibit A.

Desk Kid frowned at whatever came up on his screen. "I'm sorry. It looks like we turned you down for that program."

"What do you mean, _turned me down_?" Hurricane Ivan said. "When were you planning to tell me this?"

Nothing on the kid so much as twitched. Shego was vaguely impressed. "Actually, it would have been Hench's place to inform you."

 _So, in other words, never._

Of course Hench himself wouldn't stoop to coming out of his office to talk to some lowly newbie. His secretary and mouthpiece would deal with this kid without Hench ever having to break a sweat. He, like, hardly _ever_ sweated, and Shego relished being one of the few people who'd once put a few little beads across his forehead.

"But - but - but - but you don't understand. . ." The poor guy kept going. Words were starting to string together a little bit, but overall, he was doin' pretty well on the coherent front. Dr. D would have been in one continued scream-grunt by this point. "I'd met the terms and conditions. I have a steady income. I've had his Ultrasonic Drill Slicer for six months, and it doesn't have a scratch on it!"

"It isn't just about protecting the machine from your own clumsy mistakes." Shego didn't miss the sideways look Desk Kid shot Drakken, who was, fortunately, still wracking his memory for his social security number. "The product in question _must_ survive a raid from the authorities."

"I don't remember seeing _that_ in my contract," Hurricane Ivan said. He was breathing so quick and hard by now, Shego half-expected him to pop the tank tube into his mouth. Not that it would've helped. That thing was empty at best, probably downright fake. No way could a guy walk around that naturally with a gallon of oxygen strapped to his back.

Desk Kid kept up the smooth-and-creamy act as he adjusted his headset. "Did you also not see the clause where it states Hench can refuse you membership for any reason?"

"But I'd already paid the membership fee!" Ivan said.

"That was in your contract as well," Desk Kid said. The spray-on smile and his matching tan still didn't budge.

Hurricane Ivan's forehead lowered in a way that made the bad storm metaphors basically write themselves. "You mean to tell me - he can decide I don't qualify _after_ he charges me?"

"Yeah."

 _And here come the fireworks._

Ivan swung a just-as-freckled-as-his-face fist toward the receptionist. Drakken would've already vaulted the desk entirely and snatched up two handfuls of the kid's turtleneck. "Are your customers _aware_ that you're defrauding them like this?" Ivan spit.

Desk Kid took in a big breath, like he was preparing to lecture Hurricane Ivan on the importance of reading every word on a contract before you signed it. No kidding - sheesh, you might as well go around wearing a sign that said "Dupe Me" if you didn't plan on reading the whole thing.

Still, Shego was almost able to feel sorry for him. HenchCo was better than your average company at yanking the wool down over the eyes of any sap who wasn't leery of everyone by nature.

The way Shego was.

Her eyes went back to Drakken, who'd assumed the pose he brought out for all non-Drakken-created conflict, pulled back into a ball as if he were trying to make himself a smaller target. And he had his eyes closed and his hands clasped in his lap like he was shooting up a prayer. Naive and disconnected as the dude was, it wouldn't have surprised Shego if he thought there was something up there that was just A-OK with him enslaving the world.

But right there in front of Shego, Drakken seemed to get a good dusting from the Obnoxious Fairy and realize that somebody who WASN'T him was in trouble. And he started lapping it up like a milkshake. His puckered mouth slackened into a spitefully shiny grin, and Shego couldn't resist grinning back.

Times like that, he _actually_ felt like a real partner-in-crime.

"You will be hearing from my attorney," Ivan said - loudly enough to carry straight down the labyrinth-hall and into any of the branching-off rooms. "I'm going to sue this establishment!"

Drakken's henchmen formed a scardey-cat huddle around the watercooler, staring down into their triangle cups like they wanted to jump in and dog-paddle themselves away.

Ivan legitimately blushed with something other than anger. The guy did lower his voice, but the muscles in his neck stayed taut.

Well. At least Dr. D wasn't the only one who worked himself into a lather over Hench. That made it a _teeny_ bit less embarrassing to be affiliated with him.

"As you are perfectly within your right to do," Desk Kid agreed. He gave his head a practiced tilt. "And how will you be financing that lawsuit?"

The little - if he'd pulled that with her, Shego would've walloped it right back into hiding. But Hurricane Ivan was slowly shriveling into more of a tropical storm.

The dude was already eyeing the chair directly next to Shego - which Drakken, the little traitor, had abandoned for the squishy four-ottomans-jammed-together seat in the middle of the room. Shego slung one leg over the next seat and shot him a look that clearly said, _Occupied - unless you feel like dying_.

Cold, she knew. But warm fuzzies didn't get you anywhere in the villain world. Even Mr. I-Never-Sold-My-Baby-Blanket had figured THAT out a while back.

Ivan turned his sagging self back to the receptionist. "If you just let me talk to Hench. . . " he began, locking and loading the words, same way Dr. D did when he knew he'd been outfoxed and had to resort to those useless macho-bellows.

 _Like_ that'll _ever happen._

Shego leaned over to swap another smirk with Drakken before the moment passed, and she found herself eyeball-to-eyeball with a familiar vacant stare. The _I-know-you-but-I-couldn't-name-you_ placeholder that always glazed over him on those rare occasions where Kimmy's goofy sidekick managed to do something helpful.

No prizes for figuring out Dr. D had gone into thinking mode. His face was all scrunched up like last week's newspaper, and he was tapping his index finger almost frantically against one slice of a cheekbone. You could almost _hear_ the gears screeching against each other in his clunker-car-of-a-brain.

And for a change, Shego was looking forward to whatever it was about to churn out.

She didn't have too long to wait. Drakken's elbow gave her a knobby nudge and pulled Shego's attention back to the action at the front desk.

The kid receptionist heaved a long-suffering sigh that he _majorly_ hadn't earned yet. "Look, Mr. Ivan -"

" _Hurricane_ Ivan."

Drakken was standing up by now, rocking on the balls of his feet like a kid trying to see in the candy-store window. The henchmen fell into the exact hopeful quiet of a seventh-grade math class waiting on an old fart of a teacher _that_ far from her seat, waiting to see if she'd plop right down on the whoopee cushion.

As it turned out, she did. Desk Kid leaned forward until he was inches away from Ivan's sweat-and-freckle-beaded forehead. " _Hurricane_ Ivan, look. You can talk to Hench until you're blue in the face, and it won't do you any good."

And right when Shego realized what the plan was, Drakken was strolling up to Hurricane Ivan, pasting on his best _I-just-happened-to-be-passing-by-anyway_ look - which wasn't that great - and treating him to a brothers-in-conspiracy nod. "It's true," was all Drakken said.

Shego grinned again.

Funny how you could almost forget Dr. D _was_ blue. It was sunny and perky and he made it look normal. Not hunky or anything, but not the sorta thing you'd pay an extra five bucks to see at the circus. Not once you got used to him.

And this guy? _Definitely not used to him._ Ivan reared back and gaped and blanched, as if he were hypnotized by this horrific sight. Shego waited for Drakken's face to struggle to maintain the pride in the midst of that kind of snub, but his eyes were so huge, so sincere, so Disney-Princess-innocent that she felt a genuine giggle stir in her throat.

Ivan swung back to face Desk Kid, with Drakken still disconcertingly close. "I'll be taking my business elsewhere!" the poor guy finally stuttered.

 _Like you'll even make a DENT in Hench's profit._ Shego shook her head as the newbie stomped in place, face still sunburn-red. Hench had that effect on people. The easily-flustered kind, at least (coughDrakkencough).

"Yes, well, good luck finding another respectable establishment that willingly does business with supervillains," Desk Kid said. His version of sarcasm sounded like someone was pinching his nose shut. Amateur.

Shego watched Hurricane Ivan tow himself across the room like he already had a ball and chain clamped on his ankle. She turned to spare him one of her rare sympathetic looks. It was never any fun to get loophole-gypped by Hench for the first time.

But what Shego was still stuck on was the fact that Dr. D had actually pulled a joke on someone. That was one of the basic rules of dealing with Drakken - he was only funny when he _wasn't_ trying to be.

Drakken's idea of humor was normally to tell corny jokes and crack up himself and exactly no one else. Anyone else's attempts at jokes were met with blank stares and flat "I don't get it"s. And Shego's teasing never failed to turn him pink in the cheeks and sputtery in the tongue.

Now, though. . . Shego felt like she'd witnessed a baby taking his first steps.

She sidled up next to him. "Did you just _prank_ somebody?" she asked.

The smug smile spread from one earlobe to the other as Drakken glanced at her. "Pretty droll, eh?" he said. The "droll" squeaked, totally a sign he was about to fall all over himself chuckling.

It was almost kind of cute, how excited he was. Shego gave up the words, "You got 'im good, Doc."

"All right!" Drakken parked a palm directly in front of hers, the fingers streetlight-straight and begging. Shego turned purposefully away. Let him take over the world first - _then_ they'd see about high-fives in public.

Dude, Dr. D _must've_ been ridin' high, because even that didn't faze him. He pulled his hand back, lowered it, and wiped it on the front of his lab coat as if to ask whatever gave her the ridiculous idea that he wanted to high-five her in the first place. Smooth only by Drakken standards.

Drakken fluttered the clipboard practically into Desk Kid's lap. "Now," he said, "as you can see, I have finished re-filling out my re-application for re-membership."

A couple more "re"s and he'd fill up a Bingo card.

"That is _wonderful_ news," someone else said.

Shego turned at the sound of the talking snake and found herself squared off against Mr. Chief Executive himself. Hench adjusted the handkerchief sticking out of his lapel as if it were a loaded weapon and continued, "We _certainly_ wouldn't want to be deprived of your habit of not making purchases and then sending her to steal them at night."

Hench's nostrils wouldn't have dreamed of flaring if a SWAT team were landing on the roof, but he rubbed both sides of his nose, looking _down_ the three-inch gap where he ended and Drakken kept going. Shego had the sudden, crazy mental image of some kind of peasant dude in the Middle Ages who'd tried to marry outside his social class.

The legendary chin began to jut. "You can't call the authorities on me and you know it!" Drakken said.

"Oh, but why would I need to? The moment you use one of our weapons, you draw the authorities to _you_ , not to us." Hench clapped Drakken on the back, and Shego could almost feel the patronization oozing from his palm. "The way I see it, justice is served in the long run."

Drakken grunted the predicted string of gibberish. "Gggnnnkekkk. . . as if you know anything at all about justice, Hench!" he said. "One day, I will rain down a vengeance on this corporation so vile that you'll wish you'd gotten into my good graces when you had the chance."

For a split-second, his voice had an ominous rumble, and for a split-second, Shego almost believed him. Composed Drakken happened about three times a year, and it was pretty chilling when it did.

It lasted until Hench's face washed with _you-poor-sad-man_ , and Drakken took one half-step back, like the junkyard dog who'd been out-growled. Giving in.

Too bad - it would've been absolutely beyond hilarious to hear Drakken and Hench verbally duke it out. It occurred to Shego that Hench might eventually run out of words, but Drakken could never run out of nonsense noises.

"Attention, all henchmen!" Drakken hooked two fingertips to his bottom lip and attempted a whistle. And spit all over his hand instead.

 _Yup. They don't get much more vile than you, Dr. D._

The henchmen lumbered their loyal ways over to Drakken and he shooed them back into formation with the back of his wrist. Last thing Shego saw before their hulking bodies lined up behind Drakken and swallowed him from sight were those shoulders set so high and tight that the fabric pads were about to meet behind his neck.

Shego followed them out, still snickering to herself. Ninety-nine percent of the time, working for Dr. D was like getting paid to attend a one-man reenactment of an episode of _The Office_.

And the other one percent? The only times in her life when she knew somebody really _got_ her.

Best job she'd ever had.


	24. Job Insecurity

**~Finally got this one finished and proofread. I think it's the closest thing I've written in awhile to a Drakken-and-Shego subplot that would be on an actual episode, which wasn't a bad change of pace. Hope you all have fun with it, too.**

 **Thanks to everyone who's been reading and reviewing!~**

After three-and-a-half years of partnership, Shego had learned that Dr. Drakken had two modes: same-old-same-old or going-through-a-phase.

The first one was teeth-grindingly boring. Dr. D would invent some machine, usually a variation on something that had already been tried and hadn't worked THEN either. Explain it in kamikaze detail to Kimmy. Gasp and moan and weep when she crushed it or blew it up or fed it to his sharks.

Etc.

Even Shego's well of quips could run dry after so many reruns.

And the phases could be a gamble. Yeah, they provided a break from the tedious thing, but the things Dr. D went bonkers over tended to get more and more ridiculous.

There'd been the Canada obsession. The teen-magazine fetish. Last week, he'd converted the living room to a disco in the hopes of sending out nerve gas through the ball - a scheme that had failed 'cause Dopey Sidekick had some irrational fear of disco floors and refused to let himself _or_ Kimmy set foot in the room.

At least it gave her the chance to broaden her snark.

Shego took her usual steeling-herself breath at the door before swinging it open. Dr. D tended to get the Monday blahs, so who _knew_ what he'd been up to? It was a pretty tasty thought, actually.

The living room, though, showed every sign of being in same-old-same-old mode. There were nerd-gadgets strewn all over the floor, the poodle curled up asleep in the corner, and Drakken's anything-but-muffled giggles from his easy chair. They were edged with mischief, which was about the closest Drakken ever came to evil, and Shego's hopes lifted a little as she came to peer over his shoulder.

And then crashed to the ground when she found him poking his thumbs at his cell phone.

"What are you doing?" Shego asked.

Normally, Drakken would've jumped a mile, scream that he hadn't heard her come in, and demand that she not "sneak up on him" like that again. Not today. Shego could see the light of total involvement in the grin he swung up to her. "Oh, welcome, Shego!" he said. "You've caught me right in the middle of texting Professor Dementor!"

Shego squinted. "Since when do you have texting? With a pull-out keyboard, no less?"

It'd have been a complete waste to even ask _why_ he was texting Dementor. No doubt they were banging their chests at each other, competing to see who'd survived more stupidity-induced explosions.

"Since this weekend!" Drakken waved toward the end table, where Shego had just noticed the black flip phone she remembered was lying on its side like the chucked-away toy it basically was. "I took advantage of our recent windfall" -

AKA that lost wallet she'd had to _talk him out of_ returning.

"- to upgrade my cellular technology!" Drakken punched a key that had to be the exclamation point several times in a row and then snapped the new phone shut. It was definitely slimmer and more polished than his old one, a neater fit in his puny hand.

"You got a Robot model?" Shego asked.

"Yes!" Drakken did that head-bob that made him look like a parakeet having a seizure. "Regrettably, it does not come with actual robots, bu-u-u-ut, I have a touch screen! And the Weather Channel!" He tapped at the screen some more and then brightened to match it. "Seventy-five degrees. Why, that's perfectly lovely! We should go for a walk!"

"Yeah," Shego muttered. "Around the three feet of sand we have in every direction before the cliff drops off?"

Drakken's face crumpled into his _it-takes-all-my-self-control-not-to-stick-my-tongue-out-at-you_ look. "You haven't seen the best part yet," he said. "Here, listen to _this_!"

Another poke, and then a polite female voice said, "Hello, Dr. Drakken."

Shego cocked a brow at him. "You have _Siri_?"

"Ah-ah-ah-ah." Drakken waved that right out of the air. "Siri is her generic name. I have christened her with her own. Her name is. . . Doometria!"

"I am so glad you never had kids," Shego said.

If Drakken caught the slam, it didn't show. He bent back over his phone and practically cooed, "Hello, Doometria."

"What can I do for you today?" the thing - Shego refused to call it "Doometria" - replied.

Drakken smiled as if it had already gone to his head. "Doometria, find me the nearest walking trail."

There was a whopping four seconds of silence before it reported back with, "Located. One thousand, five hundred and fifty miles to the northwest."

Shego couldn't hold back a smirk.

"Isn't it _phenomenal_?" Drakken sprang out of his chair and winced-paced in that way that meant he'd lost feeling from the waist down. "Just think of the potential evil applications! Or should I say, the evil 'apps'?" He threw back his head in crazy-person laughter.

"You mean, being able to text 'your-mama's-so-ugly' jokes to Dementor?" Shego said.

Drakken's glare even soured the baggy skin under his eyes. "No. Why would I do. . . no, Shego, I'm talking about far grander things. Picture this: Being able to, at the push of a button, instantly know the forecast for the rest of the week, so you can plan ahead when to surprise the populace with a man-made storm! Being able to imprint photo recognition so that the phone is constantly on the lookout for Kim Possible!" He pumped both fists toward the ceiling. "Being able to, as I have already taken advantage of, locate the nearest functional holographic projector!"

"Okay, _now_ we're talkin'." Shego let herself settle onto the couch and rooted for her nail file. "Where is it?"

Drakken's chest thrust out, all Sylvester-Stallone-wannabe. "At the California Institute of Technology for the Needy," he said.

"A _charity_?" That was almost too wicked for Shego to get behind.

Almost.

Drakken flashed the sunny smile again. "Perfect, right? They'll have little to no security, allowing us to swoop in and steal the holographic projector from right under their noses!"

"What do we need a holographic projector for?" Shego said. She kept her inner cynic on the back burner - because, as amped up as Dr. D obviously still was, the sun had gone down behind that smile after a sec.

She could so get used to that.

"Ah, the holographic projector is merely Phase One," Drakken said, complete with the familiar thunder hovering between words. "And locating the projector is merely Phase One, Subset One, Subsection - "

Shego stopped him with a threatening jab of the nail file. "How about we diagram your paragraphs later and explain the rest of the plan now?"

Drakken worked the Adam's apple right in the path of the file. "Splendid idea," he said. "You see, once the holographic projector is in my possession, I will need to acquire an anesthesia dispenser to lull the rest of the world to a near-slumber! Finding and stealing _that_ is Phase Two. Phase Three will require -" He took another step and tripped over a Frisbee, of all things.

Shego grabbed him right before he could crash to his belly and shoved him upright again. Drakken absently dusted the front of his lab coat, where it hadn't even made contact with the floor, and grunted vague frustration. "Now, where _was_ I?" he said, glancing down at the phone as if it could tell him.

No joke - the next words out of his mouth were, "Doometria, what was I talking about?"

"Your last words were 'Phase Three will require'," the voice replied, as patient as only a robot COULD be with the Doc.

"Ah, yes!" Drakken shook himself free of Shego's grasp and started pacing again.

 _Huh. A "thanks" wouldn't have killed him._

Shego ran a hand over her neck hairs, which were burning at way beyond the usual Drakken-provoked prickle. "Look, Dr. D, you can't _assume_ they don't have security. Just because they're a charity doesn't mean you can just waltz in and help yourself." She would've added that charity junk was meant for "the less fortunate," but Drakken would probably argue that he qualified for that.

Drakken stroked his hairless chin the way he always did when he had a mini-epiphany. "You bring up a very good point, Shego," he mused. He looked at his phone. "Doometria, locate the blueprints for the California Institute of Technology for the Needy."

Shego heard herself laugh. "Right, like those are just gonna be floating around the Inter -"

"Results found," the phone chirped.

Unbelievable.

Drakken bared the can't-touch-this version of his smile at her. "You were saying, Shego?"

Shego got an uneasy feeling in her stomach. Being wrong was one thing, but being wrong when Drakken was _right_?

Dr. D did his geek-thing, e-mailing the blueprints from his phone to his computer and then printing off a mega-enlarged copy, singing in murmurs to himself the whole time. Only when he was settled at the kitchen table with the printout did his eyebrow pucker into the standard at-a-total-loss.

"Now if only these maps came coded the way they do in textbooks," Drakken said. "What use are top-secret blueprints if you can't figure out what in the name of Henry Jekyll those sketches represent? Where are the alarms?"

That was Shego's cue. She sauntered up to him and parked one hip against the table. "Gee, I'm no expert, but I'd say maybe those eight red dots scattered around the building are supposed to be the alarms," she said, taking a green Sharpie from her leg porch and circling the red dots that were as noticeable as an infected case of chicken pox.

Two matching dots appeared on Drakken's cheeks and then faded as he nodded. "Of course," he said. "The way they're positioned - the space between them - oooh, these appear to be hyperbolas!"

"I mean, _doy_ , right?" Shego could feel the stall in her sarcasm's usually no-effort-required slither.

Drakken, of course, was oblivious. Thank goodness. He pawed around under the table and came back with a compass - the kind Shego had used in high-school algebra - while wishing she could stab about half the class's population with it. Drakken swung the thing in wide strokes around the blueprints. "That means - the difference of the distance between the foci and any point is constant - which means -"

It meant Shego was more than happy to let her eyes glaze over.

"It means there are two lines running perpendicular to the center," Drakken continued, fingers flying so quickly he seemed to have fifty of them. "They're called the _asymptotes_."

Only Dr. D could say "asymptotes" with a straight face.

"They never quite touch the hyperbola's range!" Drakken said.

"I'll take your nerd-word for it," Shego said. Just like she'd hoped, her words came out extra-dry and harsh.

Drakken's scrappy little bloated ego wasn't deflating for that, though. "This means, if we can calculate what the asymptotes are for each hyperbola, we will be able to find points outside their radii! If we drill into the wall at a point on the asymptotes, the alarm won't detect us, and it shall not go off!"

Shego slapped a few disenchanted syllables together. "Well, that was a yawn." All she had to do was say yawn, and Drakken broke into one of his own. Maybe she wasn't completely out of her depth after all. "But, hey, if it works, I won't complain."

"No, you will not!" Drakken clapped. He seriously clapped. "Soon _no one_ will be complaining, because I will have everyone under mind control!" He must've noticed the glare Shego was stabbing his way because he added, "Not you, of course, Shego."

Well, there was that.

Drakken rushed out to his nearest nerd-desk and groped through the litter on top like a blind man without a cane. "Let's see," he muttered. "I'll need to locate my Corrosion Drill of Ultimate Power - and then find a place to keep all of the outsourced material I'll need for this plan - best to keep them altogether, so I won't have to run all over the lair locating one."

"The phrase 'putting all your eggs in one basket' comes to mind!" Shego called. _So do several other things._

Wasted on the Doc. He did a few more hand-doodles on the desktop and then thrust his fists toward the ceiling as if he'd scored the game-saving home run. "Shego, this is magnifilicious! Our hour of victory is at hand!"

At least he'd said "our" - ya know, in addition to whatever that one disfigured word was meant to be.

Drakken grabbed the Frisbee off the floor and gave it a triumphant toss into the air. It zinged to the nearest wall and bounced off. Shego ducked in time. Drakken didn't, and it beaned him in the temple, and he squalled like it had managed to penetrate his thick skull.

The noose in Shego's stomach loosened. Even in a phase, he was the same ol' Drakken.

"Doometria, find me an app that helps you sort objects by category," Drakken said, rubbing at his head.

 _If she brings up Candy Crush, we're_ all _doomed._

* * *

The first thing Shego heard when she entered the lair the next morning was the blast of the Oh Boyz' newest CD. Drakken was probably going into some impromptu dance that'd land him in the chiropractor's office by the end of the week. It was one of the more obnoxious parts of the victory-in-our-grasp routine, but she could live with it.

What she _couldn't_ live with was what she saw as soon as she soundlessly pushed open the door to Drakken's lab.

Some violet-blue, light-spilling gadget with the accordion neck of an antique camera was enthroned on his desktop. Shego tried to keep her brain from galloping toward the cynical thing, but _that_ wasn't something she'd had a lot of practice with. She hadn't convinced herself of anything by the time Drakken, still singing along in his surprisingly decent voice, waved his hand in front of the lens and a perfect, blown-up replica of his hand appeared on the back wall.

Shego let her bag fall to the floor with a thud - and her words with it. "Hi. There. Drakken."

Drakken got the blush-dots again and hastily turned down the music. At this point, it coulda been the _Teletubbies_ soundtrack for all Shego cared.

"Good morning, Shego!" he said. "You're here early."

 _Does he even CARE that he just pulled a Benedict Arnold?_

"Okay. Wow." Shego gestured to the device on the desk. "That's the Holographic Projector, isn't it?"

"Indeed it is," Drakken said, stroking the thing's neck-pleats with tenderness normal people reserved for kittens. "Oh, Shego, it's even more advanced than I ever dreamed!"

"You stole it without me." Shego splintered herself between Drakken and the machine and burrowed her eyes into him.

The very fact that he could even meet her gaze had Shego wishing a root canal on him. "Well, last night, I was lying around with nothing to do," Drakken said, "and so I asked Doometria to find Middleton High's football schedule. There was a game on at that very minute!" He beamed, almost blinding Shego with something bordering on competence as he held up a finger. "Knowing Kim Possible would be cheering at said game, I had Doometria calculate how long it would take to travel from Middleton to the California Institute of Technology for the Needy."

Drakken straightened up and looked every inch of his five-foot-ten, instead of the five-seven-or-so he usually stooped to. He palmed the thin phone like a cigarette lighter.

"And you didn't even bother to call me?" Shego said. She could've spit.

"Of course. Not. Yes. No. That is to say - I knew with mathematical certainty that I couldn't set off the alarms, and even if I did, Kim Possible would never be able to arrive at the building before I was long gone!" Drakken whipped the ponytail that had only gotten partially rubber-banded today, and suddenly he was looking at her as if she were the knock-off brand. "You see, Shego, there was really no need for you."

Kimmy had never walloped the air from Shego that hard.

Noticing he hadn't said it like an insult didn't do much to help. Definitely nothing comforting about his _I-might-as-well-be-reciting-multiplication-tables_ tone.

" _What_?" Shego practically shrieked.

No reply from Drakken. He was pacing around the desk in that busy little way he had, stopping every now and then to give the hologram projector another lovey-dovey pat.

 _Okay - different approach._

Shego tucked her arms into a super-casual fold. "So - the heist went off without a hitch, then?" So did that sentence, sounding like whoever Drakken did or didn't bring along on his heists were - what was that ridiculously snotty thing he always said? - "none of her concern."

Drakken's chest started to expand, and Shego could almost see the hot air he was pumping into himself. "Indeed it did, Shego! _And_ I stole a stack of complementary calendars!"

Shego gave a light snort. "See, I was always under the impression that something complementary, _by definition_ can't be stolen." It was the first flash of recognizable feeling she'd had all morning.

Drakken squinted at her until his scar rose up to meet the circles under his eyes that always looked like a botched makeup job. "You're mocking me, aren't you?"

"Yep," Shego freely admitted.

Drakken sniffed. " _Doometria_ doesn't do that."

Whatever washed over Shego right then might as well have belonged to a stranger. _Shego_ didn't watch helplessly as her world spiraled out of control. _Shego_ didn't get jealous of somebody's _cell phone_ , for Pete's sake. _Shego_ didn't develop gut-knots over the thought of losing Drakken's codependency.

Shego waited until the urge to smack him overpowered everything else before she even TRIED talking again. "Well, whoop-de-doo for the phone, then," she said - as best as she could with her jaw on lockdown.

Drakken had already turned back to the dry-erase board covered with a language of symbols and formulas and scribbles that made sense only to Drakken. "Now that Phase One is complete, I can move on to Phase Two!" His back stiffened even more, wind-up-toy-style. "I will use my Soporific Agent -"

 _Provided he can find it._

" - to lull the citizens of the world to Slumberland, thereby making them more susceptible to my third ray - "

"Okay. Question." Shego flipped her hand ever-so-slightly into the air until Drakken swerved back to her. "Why not just straight-up mind-control them instead of lulling 'em to sleep first?"

Drakken's lips scrunched into an off-center knot. "Well," he said, the boom disappearing for a second, "mind control in ray form is something I've yet to perfect. I've only gotten as far as a Subliminal Messaging Ray."

"Which of course you've tested."

Dr. D didn't catch the slam this time. His fingers were wandering around each other in circles. "It works on the henchmen - though, curiously, only when they're drowsy."

"Hence your Sophomoric Agent," Shego said.

Dr. D shot her an evil-clown glare. "It's _soporific_ , Shego, not _sophomoric_."

"Actually, I think it's both," Shego said, and she felt the tension drain from her muscles. They were used to standing taut, ready for the next clobber, but not to going into rattlesnake coils.

"But I can't let anything even semi-successful go to waste!" Drakken added in a rush.

Doubt dipped his shoulders. Shego could feel a cold smile creeping across her face.

Drakken glanced down at the phone resting in his palm. When had he picked it up again? "Doometria," he sighed, "please confirm that I am a genius."

Shego's jaw unlocked and took a straight downward plunge before she pulled it back in. He was asking the phone to tell him he was a genius? Wasn't that one of the main reasons he kept _her_ around?

She could almost hear Drakken in her head, wheedling, _But Doometria actually DOES it._

"Genius confirmed, Dr. Drakken," the phone said.

"Thank you," Drakken said - To. The. Phone. "Would you like to hear my plan?"

 _Oh, yeah. That'll make everything better._

"Certainly," said the phone.

Drakken breathed in deeply and dove into full-on monologue. "I will use the Soporific Agent to lull the citizens of the world to a near-slumber. You know that stage halfway between awake and asleep, the one where you're lucid but just barely?"

 _You mean that one you're in about ninety percent of always?_

The phone dinged like it was agreeing.

"Then, while their brains are sleepy and vulnerable, I will activate both the Hologram Projector and the Subliminal Messaging Ray, thereby beaming my image into everyone's bleary vision simultaneously! I will demand to be made ruler of the world, and when they wake up, they will have no idea why - but they will be quick to obey." Drakken didn't even need to pant at the end of that - he had blabber _mastered_. "Pretty brilliant, eh?"

"Brilliant, indeed," the phone said. Shego had to hand it to "her" - she'd never seen a phone kiss up before. "I do have one suggestion to improve it, however?"

"And what would that be?" Drakken asked - way louder than he had to, considering Shego was _right there_.

"What if you presented yourself as benevolent and persuaded the people to elect you rather than threatening them? This would, I believe, be much more effective. After all, you catch more flies with honey - "

" - than with vinegar!" Drakken finished. He tossed his shaggy head back and howled. Only the fact that the phone didn't howl with him kept Shego from plasma-blasting him a new skylight.

 _Good grief. They sound like an old married couple._

Drakken turned back to Shego then with such an exaggeratedly wide-open expression, Shego wanted to slice off the nose he literally had stuck in the air. "You see, Shego?" he said. " _That_ 's the way to do it."

Shego's entire body turned to stone, right down to the mouth she'd always been able to count on. All she could do was look at Drakken, expecting to get his rare, creepy, flinty-eyed stare in return.

But there wasn't any flint in sight. The Doc's eyes were so shiny and excited, the whites seemed to glow even under their bloodshot zigzags. He was as into this as he'd ever been with any phase - maybe more - and she had no idea what he'd pull next.

The noose cinched in Shego's stomach again, and it fit her about as well as her sixth-grade jeans. _Somebody get me a barf bag - now._

She had never missed monotony half this bad before.

* * *

Monotony _and_ Dr. D being Mr. Needy Puppy.

Yeah, not being at Drakken's beck and call wasn't half as relaxing as Shego had always imagined it would be. Not with half her body stiffened up in preparation for when he finally _did_ yell for her and the other half slackened with the suspicion that he never would. Not with her eyeballs cramping to roll.

This _wasn't_ the kind of monotony she'd been hoping for.

She'd already given herself a full mani-pedi and flipped through _Villains_ magazine three times with newly-painted nails. Hench had an interview with some new villainness named Camille Leon, who Shego had come to think of Spoiled Ex-Heiress Baby, and who'd become a shapeshifter through the miracle of modern plastic surgery. Kimmy would down her like a health shake. If Shego had to look at that pampered lip-curl and those over-the-top diamond earrings one more time, she _might_ barf - something she'd never done on the job.

If you could call this a job anymore.

Well, for total lack of anything else to do, she could always dredge up what she remembered from Honors Class Science and try to fix that one fuse Dr. D had blown in some scheme last month. Dude did not have even that little C-grade Electronique's natural touch with electricity. Shego was pawing under the couch for the operator's manual when a too-excited cry of "Yoo-hoo! Shego! Come he-ere!" blasted out.

Shego tried not to look overly eager as she strolled into Drakken's lab - after all, this thing probably was gonna be lame with a side of nonsense. He greeted her with grease smearing the front of his lab coat and embedded in his come-and-go forehead wrinkles. "Ah, Shego, good!" he said. "The Soporific Agent and the Subliminal Messaging Ray are both ready for testing!"

The fake-gold pole that supported a supersized lamp, complete with shade, took up a whole back wall. Invention number one. And that thing hooked onto Drakken's belt, in its own _I-think-I'm-John-Wayne_ holster, had to be number two.

"Wow," Shego said. "You fixed those up all by yourself."

Man, she _was_ off her game. A line like that always shot straight to Drakken's head and turned him insufferable for the rest of the week.

But this time, Drakken lowered his gaze almost shyly, though he was grinning. "Well, not _entirely_ by myself," he said. "Doometria helped me."

"Fantastic. How'd she do that?" Shego clamped down on the words.

"Oh, I merely had to scan my blueprints into her. From then on, whenever I held up a part, she illuminated its exact placement." His voice wasn't malicious, just smug.

Shego let herself snort. "That sounds like it'd be _more_ work than just asking me to tell you."

Drakken whisked that away like she'd spoken in Hungarian. "Yes, but see, Shego, this technology is the wave of the future! You know, when I was a child, we didn't have artificial intelligence at all. Not even personal computers!"

"I know," Shego said. "I've read the history books." It was her first potshot of the day, and it felt better than a Dead Sea facial.

Drakken glared at her with all the scare factor of a troll doll. "That's why I've called the two of you in here to witness this momentous occasion and provide me with your feedback!"

The TWO of them. Yep, this was descending into Wacko Town waaaaay too quickly for Shego's taste.

Drakken propped the phone up on the table like he was burping a baby while Shego dragged her reluctant self to the director-type chair he'd provided for her. He stood with his hands clasped behind his back, his eyes fixed on some place between Shego and the phone. "The Soporific Agent will use the most foolproof method of inducing near-sleep currently known to mankind," he said.

"It's gonna recount stories from your childhood?" Shego said.

"It will invoke sensations that trigger an automatic fatigue response from the brain?" the phone chimed in.

Drakken smiled like everybody's favorite kindergarten teacher and flicked his finger at the phone. "Ding-ding-ding, Doometria!" He turned back to face Shego, dragging the corners of his mouth down. "And Shego - sorry, maybe next time."

Shego could almost see him keeping score behind his eyes. She was stuck in a daze pretty darn similar to the one that seemed to hang on Dr. D - the kind where moving anything was like walking through a glue bottle.

Her thoughts, on the other hand, were coming at breakneck speed. _Why the HECK did I say that? My job's already on the line, and I go and_ insult _him? Shouldn't I try being extra-nice?_

 _Right. And why don't I compose a symphony or two while I'm at it?_

The noose cramped.

Drakken skipped over the door and tugged it open to yell out into the hallway, "All right, Fred, your presence is required now! It's time for you to come take a little _siesta_!"

 _Ay carrumba._

The henchman who must've been Fred lumbered in through a door barely big enough for him and followed Drakken to the perfect square Drakken had sketched on the floor. In sidewalk chalk, unless Shego missed her guess.

Drakken squeezed the henchman's massive bicep. "Now, Fred," he said - in a tone sugary enough to give you cavities. "I need you to stand right here in this square and don't move a muscle, all right? If my calculations are accurate, this shouldn't hurt a bit."

That was when Shego herself woulda stormed out of the room. But Fred stayed slavishly still, even after Drakken turned his back and swaggered around to his enormous lamppost. His only twitch was an absent scratch at his backside.

Shego felt her lip lift to Camille-heights. _Sheesh_ \- they made Drakken look like your ideal gentleman.

"Goggles down, Shego!" Drakken hollered to her from across the room.

"What goggles?" she called back.

There was a sheepish pause. "Oops. These!" Drakken reared up and tossed a pair to her. His throwing arm was about as good as a six-year-old's, but Shego had caught the purple-visored goggles and clipped them over her eyes while Drakken was still fumbling with his.

A green beam trickled from the lamp and pooled around the henchman. Drakken followed that up with a shot from the ray on his belt, fingers tucked into the holster, milking the Wild West flavor for MORE than it was worth. Shego kept her fingers crossed that Fred wouldn't explode or something equally messy.

He didn't. His head tipped down to meet his bearlike chest, and he started making those soft little huffs Shego remembered from the days when the Wegos would insist on staying up to watch the end of Superman II.

"All righty then, Fred." With obvious effort, Drakken subdued the boom, switching over to something he probably picked up from a hypnotist in the dregs of 2 AM cable. "You are getting sleepy. You are getting verrrrrrrry sleeeeeepy."

"I _am_ getting sleepy," Fred agreed with a yawn. "Can I go to bed, Boss?"

"Nnnnnnnnnnot yet," Drakken said. He bounced his knuckles off each other and cleared his throat. "You know, Fred, this world is in awfully bad shape, is it not? Look at the pollution in our oceans, the wars devastating young nations, the politicians accepting bribes under the table! I want to fix it, but I'm going to need your help."

Shego's own breath caught. For half a second, he'd stopped being some little-boy parody of a supervillain. For half a second, he was convincing, passion shining all over his face, his fists clenched like heads were gonna roll if he didn't get his way in the next few minutes.

She could _not_ lose this job.

"When you are fully awake, Fred, you will do everything in your power to assure that Dr. Drakken gains absolute control of the planet Earth," Drakken said. He split a wicked grin Fred's way. "Understood?"

"Understood."

"Now - I'll turn this off -"

Shego sprang from her chair. "Yeah, Dr. D, because he totally wasn't just saying that to get a raise!"

Drakken gaped at her. Between the confusion and those goggles blowing his eyes up to the size of hula hoops, it was almost painful to look at him.

"Your henchmen already support your bid for world domination, Dr. Drakken," the phone said. "To confirm that your Subliminal Messaging Ray works, why not ask them to do something they wouldn't have done without outside influence?"

"Excellent point, Doometria!" Drakken gave Shego another bug-eyed glance. "You see, Shego? Doometria knows how to give constructive criticism without feeling the need to be saucy about it."

Saucy. That was a new one.

 _Actually_ storming from the room, complete with a door-slam, sounded pretty nifty right about then, but a temper tantrum had always been _Drakken_ 's MO. It would've definitely been one more thing the stupid phone didn't do.

"Now, Fred, one last thing," Drakken was already saying before Shego could rip out his voicebox. "When you fully awaken, you will also be irresistibly drawn to walk on your hands for the next forty-eight hours. Understood?"

"Yeah," said the henchman. Apparently he'd used up today's supply of three syllable-words.

Shego threw herself back against the chair. She didn't know what she'd been _expecting_ , but he'd sounded so competent there for a minute behind the controls.

Drakken punched a few more buttons, and the ray blinked off Fred and retreated back into the lamp. "You are dismissed," Drakken said, clinically as a doctor.

Fred nodded and left - on his hands, natch, the soles of his soft boots brushing the doorframe as he went out. Drakken's shoulders rumbled with chuckles that could've been heard a continent over. Only one of the henchmen wouldn't have figured out they were being played.

Shego pulled off her own goggles and dropped them as hard as she could into Drakken's lap. "Well, congrats, it actually works," she said. Even she could hear that she was talking with all the inflection of a flat tire. "Little Miss Goody-Two Shoes is just gonna fall all over herself to help a robbed _charity_ , though, so she'll probably be here, oh, say _any second_?"

Kimmy would actually be WELCOME at this point. Scoring a direct hit on her always improved Shego's mood. Besides, who'd ever heard of a kick-butt phone?

"So I'm gonna go check the security cameras," Shego said. She shook her hair back into place and was about to walk away when Drakken jumped in front of her, chest poked out so far Shego didn't see how he could keep his balance.

"There's no need, Shego," he said. "Kim Possible is not on the premises."

"How do you _know_?"

 _If he says his phone's on it, then so help me..._

"I scanned a full-body photo of our teenage nemesis onto my phone," Drakken said, the self-satisfaction thick. "Doometria memorized her from every angle and is on high alert for any sign of her."

Pieces of Shego's life scattered away like a deck of cards some moron had turned a fan on. She stared that moron smack in the face. Even though she knew her swallow was invisible, she couldn't shake the feeling that she'd just rolled over and surrendered.

Drakken's _you're-okay-but-I'd-rather-have-the-name-brand_ look did zilch for that. "I'll let you know if anything happens, okay, Shego?"

That was so _backward_.

"In the meantime, you can go file your nails or whatever it is you do," Drakken said. Again with the no-malice thing. It might've been _easier_ to take with some.

Shego felt something close off inside her own chest. She bit hard into her own tongue to stop herself from saying, _Can't I at least go fix the fuse?_ No matter how vital this job was to her, it was even more important that she NOT beg on all fours for Drakken.

The only thing more revolting would've been to go crawling back to her brothers.

Shego strolled from the lab and waited until she was back on the living room couch before smashing her forehead into the nearest wall. Plasma pulsed extra-strong in her fingertips. Kimmy wouldn't know what hit her today.

* * *

Except Kimmy never showed. By the time Shego left for the day, her anger was about to scorch a hole in her skin.

That red fall of hair showing up on Dr. D's sensors was the only bit of insurance she had left. If Shego were as paranoid as Drakken, she'd think the little brat was staying away on purpose. Like the whole Drakken-and-smart-phone team-up creeped _her_ out as bad as it did Shego.

* * *

"Ohhhhh, doodles with _cheese_!"

Ninety-nine percent of Shego's body wanted to whiplash toward the sound of Drakken's G-rated curses. She went with the one percent that had retained some sanity and rose slowly from the couch, taking her sweet time sauntering to the lab. No way was she going to broadcast the desperation that was starting to nip at her edges like a nagging cough.

It didn't show, at least not to Drakken. He stood in the middle of the lab, with his eyes drooped and his hands in frustration-tight fists, kicking at his desk over and over.

Shego made sure to subtract the sarcasm from her voice before she said, "What's wrong, Doc?" Ordinarily, she'd have snarked him into next Tuesday for setting up some kind of deranged competition between her and the phone.

But that was the whole point - the competition. If Shego brought out the nasty NOW, she might as well concede on the spot.

Warmonga's face flashed through Shego's mind, and she ground her teeth.

"Ohh, Shego," Drakken mumbled through a pout. "I just tested my Soporific Agent on the henchmen back in their quarters. And it didn't work! It doesn't have sufficient range!" Another desk-kick, followed by the cry of pain Shego'd been expecting.

"Which means. . .?"

"It means I'll need some sort of Ray-Expanding Ray," Drakken said.

 _Just when ya think you've heard it all. . ._

Drakken jerked the cell phone close. How that looked so natural after less than a week was a mystery Shego didn't want solved. "Doometria, locate a Ray-Expanding Ray."

In the four seconds it took for "her" to obey, Drakken tapped his toe rapidly against the crack of his new lava pit. He never should've been introduced to wi-fi. His patience had been spotty enough to start with.

"Okay. Here is what I found," the phone said. Shego was surprised it didn't continue gushing about what a genius Drakken was until his head popped open like a zit.

"Ah, yes, an experimental lab in Paris! Wonderful, Doometria!" Drakken said.

 _Now, see, to me "experimental" means "we don't know for sure yet that it's not gonna blast a hole in you."_

"Blueprints for that lab, please," was Drakken's next request.

The schematics appeared on the screen. Shego smothered the first happy sound she'd had any reason to make in quite awhile and plastered imitation boredom on her face. "Whoa. That's a lotta lasers, Dr. D," she said.

Drakken gave her the hollow look that meant he was already calf-deep in whatever his brain needed to do with a problem. "Meaning. . ."

Subtlety lost on him, as always.

Shego examined the blades in her gloves. "Meaning you and your fancy walkie-talkie probably can't just bust in like last time."

"Ah, yes. Good point, Shego." Drakken tapped his index finger against his cheek. "Very good point."

He was still doing the teacher-thing, and the teacher's-pet thrill that Shego felt was as obnoxious as the whole rest of this mess. She refused to grin until Dr. D had turned his back.

* * *

Tomorrow morning's pause-at-the-door wasn't to buckle down her nerves for whatever Drakken was gonna whip up today. It was a moment to regather the Shego-pieces. They hadn't gone far, but scrambling for them was like playing the world's most humiliating game of fifty-two pick-up.

And as soon as she swung open the door, they split again.

All the furniture in the living room had been pushed back into the kitchen, leaving the space free for a web of reddish lasers to crisscross from the ceiling all the way down to the floor. Dr. D - the man who couldn't wear shoelaces without tumbling over them - was managing to maneuver above, below, and around them. He moved like a wiener dog on stilts trying to Samba. But he was moving - and missing more limbos than he hit.

Even as Shego watched, he ducked his head and pulled his legs in toward his torso until he was almost a box and slipped, not so easily, between two laser points.

She let the door bang shut behind her. It startled Drakken from his yoga-pose and he crashed jaw-first onto a beam, which set off a round of furious sirens. Shego could almost feel it smoothing down her hackles.

"Uh. . . what exactly's going on here, Doc?"

Drakken glanced up from his grunt-marathon as if Shego were someone only distantly familiar. "Oh, Shego. Good morning. You're just in time to witness my new laser simulation."

 _Yeah, no thanks. I've "witnessed" plenty._

"How'd you set it up?" seemed like the safest thing to say.

Drakken hopped over a mid-height laser, one runty foot at a time, and grinned back over his shoulder at her. "I didn't. Doometria did."

"What." Shego didn't take the trouble to make it a question. Plasma stood at attention inside her fingers.

"It's one of her new apps!" Drakken said. "Incredibly lifelike and proven to increase your coordination by at least twenty-two percent. It's going to help me become more independent."

Why did he have to say it so kindly? If Shego bloodied his nose on the spot, he'd be as bewildered as Commodore Puddles not getting the connection to the puddle he'd made six hours ago.

Shego had never used Drakken's mind-switching machine - thank her lucky stars or whatever - but this _had_ to be how it felt to land in someone else's body. The noose was cinched and ready in her stomach, and the lynch mob marched through her with every heartbeat. Her vision blurred with a silent, fiery scream.

"Isn't it grand?" Drakken continued.

Shego could only nod. Her head might as well have been attached to a brick.

She was about ten miles past grateful when Dr. D finally shut the stupid simulation off and went back to muttering over his blueprints. For the second time in as many days, Shego wondered what went on in Drakken's brain that let him agonize over every detail and _still_ miss the issues big enough to KO the plan with one punch. Shego's own brain was more like a virus scanner - traveling down a series of simple paths, searching for any threat, and then pulling together a plan to eliminate them.

And there was one infected little hard drive that was just _begging_ to be wiped.

Ugh. Shego wanted to snarl at herself. This crud-fest had her thinking in Drakken-grade-tacky metaphors. That might just have been the point of no return.

And, competition or not, she couldn't stay Miss Sweet-and-Supportive a second longer.

* * *

The next day, Shego didn't bother to steel herself at the door. She swung it right open and immediately donned her best _oh-my-gosh-was-not-expecting-THAT_ face as Dr. D's eyes traveled to the tabletop - to the scrap of twisted metal and broken, scorched glass that used to be his phone.

"Doometria!" Drakken bellowed. He scooped the mangled thing into his hands as if he were actually gonna try and give it CPR. "Doometria, speak to me!"

Shego came up and gave his shoulder pad a sympathy pat. "I think she's toast, Doc," she said. She had to play it cool here - either too much sass or not enough, and even Drakken might figure out something was up.

"What. . . what do you suppose happened?" There was no room for suspicion between Drakken's words. A big ol' honkin' sniffle took up all the space.

"Maybe she fell in the toilet," Shego said, shrugging.

Drakken's eyebrow tangled over itself. "This looks like lava damage, Shego. We don't have boiling lava in our toilets!"

Could've said something really gross here, but Shego opted not to.

"Poor old girl must have toppled into the lava pit," Drakken said. He gently rested the chunk-o'-junk back on the table, and then he raised his index finger straight above him. "Doometria, rest assured - I will honor your memory."

His bottom lip started a quiver that ran all the way down to his pelican chin. It was like she'd gone ahead and run over his puppy, too. Shego could almost feel sorry for him.

For about half a minute.

* * *

It was almost amazing how fast things went back to so-called normal. Within ten minutes and a few stray tears, Drakken had dug his flip phone out of hiding, lovingly "buried" his new phone in its container, and taken himself off to his lab to sulk. Nobody could mourn for a piece of tech like Dr. D.

And the tension that had hung like static in the air was parted enough to breathe again. And smirk. And resume the always-waiting pose on the couch. Even if Dr. D _did_ manage to add it up - he'd have zero competent help if he fired her, and that was one of the few things Drakken had always known.

He hadn't called for her yet, though, and Shego's arms had started to clench against the cushions. The doing-nothing was driving her even more crazy than Drakken's insanely complicated explanations of his equally-overcomplicated plans. It was the same as the one time she'd strained a quad fighting Kimmy and couldn't quite get it to pop back in place.

When Drakken finally did emerge from his lab, the sight of him tickled a laugh out of Shego. The purple-framed nerd-goggles were pushed to the top of his head, forgotten, and everything on him slumped downward, defeated. Instead of some machine part that she'd have to pretend to find fascinating, Drakken was holding a glossy copy of _Reader's Digest_.

"Is that this month's?" Shego asked.

Drakken nodded - shamefacedly. "Will you read the funny stories out loud? Please?"

Holy crow, he'd said the "p" word. The quad recovered as if it'd been massaged.

"I'm surprised you didn't have 'Doometria' read them to you already," Shego said. Now that the thing was kaput, she could bring herself to say the dumb name. It went well with a lip-curl.

One Drakken didn't see, not with his eyes directed down at his toes. "She couldn't use a funny voice the way you do," he said, sending a dim, almost-nervous version of the smile her way.

And because that was the closest thing to an "I'm sorry" that Dr. Drakken ever said, Shego accepted the magazine and flipped it open to the first story.


	25. A Hiccup in the Time Stream

**~Guess what: I'm still alive. My brain's just been off on some other planet lately; I don't think I even got around to reply to last chapter's reviewers. I've got no excuses, but I'm here now, and I really appreciate everyone who reads and reviews. I'll try to be more in the loop starting now. Love ya guys!**

 **In the meantime, have some fun with our beloved characters' hopelessly-dorky middle-school selves! :D**

 **Occasional non-word is meant to capture Drakken's "voice."~**

The word blossoming in Dr. Drakken's mind like a sunrise was _foolproof_.

All right, so - as Shego had often been unkind enough to point out - he'd said that about several schemes before, and they'd all been foiled. And did sunrises actually blossom? Hmmm, he'd have to flip back through that poetry book Mother got him once. The world would expect its new ruler to be eloquent. . . i. . . fied.

Still, none of that mattered right now. Drakken held the key to global conquest in the palm of his hands. Well, actually, it was in the palm of both hands, wedged behind his back as he stood before Shego. Even when he used the term _foolproof_ , she only gave him an eyebrow-hike, and that was nothing. Shego could be _far_ sassier with her face if she wanted to.

"Shego," Drakken said, holding it in his throat long enough to feel the succulent rumble, "time travel is no longer a thing of the future! It is now a thing of the present! Well, I suppose it can still be a thing of the future, since it can _transport_ you there - or to the past - but that doesn't -"

"Was there a point to this?" Shego interrupted. Her lack of inflection suggested that no, no there wasn't, and maybe she should just go back to her magazine until further notice.

And he _couldn't_ have that happen, not when he was this close! Drakken shook his head several times at her and hoped the gesture didn't seem too pathetic. "Behoooollld," he droned, whipping out the compact gray rhombus of an object that had been cramping his wrists, "the world's first functional time machine!"

 _Now_ Shego's profile was one big caustic blade. "It looks like a toaster."

"Wha?"

Drakken studied his brilliant invention. All right, so its sinister metallic finish _did_ seem small-appliance appropriate. Add to that the dials used to scroll back through the years, the handle-like activators, and the two crowning slits that displayed today's date, and -

Curse Shego. It was as if she viewed everything through a flaw-enlarging magnifying glass - and left it there until you caught fire like some poor tortured ant.

"Maybe it can make time toast," Drakken said, knowing as soon as he finished the sentence that he never should have started it.

"What the heck is 'time toast'?" Shego said.

Drakken forced his smirk to outgrow hers - not a difficult feat, considering how wide and rubbery his mouth was in comparison to hers. "Something I couldn't expect the average mind to comprehend."

Shego snorted, which through the universe's unfair dispersion of luck, she could do without sounding like a congested hog. It seemed to broadcast that she'd won, even though she _hadn't_!

The sting was hard to shake off, but Drakken made a valiant effort, whipping his ponytail in the process. "You recall, Shego, how we've been trying to destroy Kim Possible for years now?"

"Oh, we have?"

Drakken refused to indulge her in that one. "And how we've failed every time because she's freakishly overqualified for a girl her age?" His fists tightened, the anger like the much-needed drop of a potent chemical refusing to leave the container. "For _anyone's_ age?"

"Yup."

"And then it occurred to me," Drakken said, "that all of our attempts were against her present-day self! Why not simply invent a time machine and travel back to a time before she was well-nigh invincible?"

"Yeah," Shego agreed. "Don't know _why_ we didn't think of that before." She examined her gloves, obviously to hide how impressed she secretly was. "So where will be warping back to?"

"Ah-ah-ah. _When_ , Shego, not _where_. And not warping. This is _time_ travel, not _space_ travel." It was Drakken's turn with the magnifying glass, and he planned to get as much mileage out of it as a human being could. "You know, you really should do more research on your - "

Shego held up a threatening finger.

"Middle school!" Drakken answered, taking another moment to savor the boom so that he didn't _sound_ as though he were kowtowing to his sidekick. "The land of blemishes, hormones, and vacillating self-esteem. If there's a more vulnerable period in any adolescent's life, I don't know what it could be!"

Shego nodded, as if she could understand, as if she had ever, ever been anything other than strong and confident and cutting. Drakken's own memories pinched at his mind just a smidgeon less.

"Kim Possible in her pre-glory days!" Drakken said as he rotated the dial. Today's date stayed securely printed on the top slot, but the bottom scrolled to nearly-five years ago, in the middle of September. "Want to see?"

He was reaching for the handle - doggone it, the _activator_ \- when Shego suddenly piped up, "Whoa. You're just gonna slam us back into the past? Just like that?"

There was a sprinkling of something in her voice - not quite fear; it was more an edge of _Drakken-are-you-_ stupid _?!_ That was Shego's way.

"Oh, relax. It's perfectly safe," Drakken said. "We even have a Panic button and a Reset button. They're both made out of indestructium -"

"That's not a real metal."

"Gnnnggk - hush. Even if the rest of the time machine is destroyed, they will be undamaged. The Panic button sends us back to the present day and the precise location where we activated our journey through time. The Reset button will erase the memories of everyone involved in the incident, including you and I." Drakken finished with a flourish of his arms and the rush of using _I_ when your standard halfwit would just say _me_.

"Sounds...smart," Shego said. The words groaned out as if she were passing a kidney stone.

Drakken's smile was so wide it ached. Receiving that praise from Shego was like struggling your way up Mount Everest, fording the Mississippi River, and accomplishing several other things of geological significance. "I know, right?" he said.

With the smoothness of a professional, he reached out and pulled the activator down.

To Drakken's immense satisfaction, there was no "KA-CHUNG!" toaster-noise. There was only a flash of light that had Drakken seeing diamonds, and then a gust of air that suspended him somewhere beyond a gravitational field, organs floating inside him and tumbling as he sped through a funnel of pure G-forces.

Maybe Shego hadn't been so far off when she'd likened it to space travel.

After only seconds, the funnel tapered away, and Drakken was lying tummy-down on his lair's floor. His temples throbbed and his pores, strangely, itched. Was there such a thing as time cooties?

Drakken leaped to his feet - _whoops_ , apparently a little too quickly. The room bucked and sent out a wave of dizziness that dropped him back to one knee.

When Drakken rose again, at a more mild rush this time, he swiveled around to check on Shego. She had one hand pressed to her forehead, squinting at nothing in particular. For the briefest of instants, even _she_ was not immune to the effects of time travel, and she could not name Drakken her inferior.

Drakken scanned the room and its surrounding halls. It was immediately familiar and negligibly different. The maroon walls had a cleaner shine to them, and the kitchen door was smooth, unmarked by the hole Drakken had accidentally lasered into it last month.

 _It worked!_

And then footsteps pattered down from three rooms away - footsteps so important, demanding, and precise they could only belong to Dr. Drakken himself.

Drakken snagged Shego's sleeve and tugged her into the shadows. "Come on," he hissed. "We better get out of here before our old selves show up - well, I mean our younger selves - well, I mean - "

" _Your_ younger self," Shego hissed in return.

Oh, right. Sometimes it was hard to remember that. Drakken felt like he'd known Shego just a few months shy of forever.

"Well, at any rate, we'd best be going." Drakken curled his grip tighter around the arm of Shego's jumpsuit and led her quickly to the door. "Crossing your own timeline rarely ends well."

Drakken spoke this with authority. He had read everything from _The Time Machine_ to _The Magic Treehouse_ and marathoned _Doctor Who_ for twenty-four straight hours before he'd even _begun_ work on his machine.

They hustled out the door onto the UNWELCOME mat and the skinny strip of sand where the hovercraft awaited them. Drakken climbed in, and although it probably didn't count as stealing when the owner was your own past self, he nevertheless felt the sweet release of evil spread as if it had been plugged into him with an IV.

That was more than just gratifying. It momentarily united him with Shego, who swung herself one leg at a time into the passenger seat. She was smiling at him, and not the kind of smile that characterized watching someone make an utter idiot of himself. It was one villain to another.

Shego tapped the dashboard. "What are you gonna do if your old self finds out it's missing?"

Drakken inflated his chest to counteract the sag before it could become noticeable. "Oh, I'll think of something. I _am_ a genius, after all."

* * *

Not to brag - but it was the truth.

This Drakken was persuaded of as they landed on the Middleton Middle School lawn. The trip had taken them overseas and cross-country without a hitch. No police pulled them over, likely because - eh-heh - Dr. Drakken hadn't made much of a legend of himself until Shego had joined his workforce.

MMS was smaller than Drakken remembered it being, yet no less imposing. Sometime after his interance as a student here, the building had been repainted a sunny orange, exactly the shade that twelve-year-olds everywhere resented. The lawn was clipped shorter than it had been - and so were the girls' skirts as a group of them sashayed up the front walk.

Drakken ducked behind the hovercraft - why had he built such a short hovercraft? He had to practically crab-squat to ensure only his eyes peeked out above as he scanned the group for a redhead.

Nope. One girl's hair was blonde, the other's was black, and the bossy-looking one who marched in the lead was a brunette.

 _Of course, even if it were Kim Possible - she wouldn't recognize me yet._

Drakken truncated a chortle. Yes, he was so brilliant that sometimes it took him awhile to catch up with himself.

Shego had parked herself right beside the hovercraft, propping her back against it, ankles crossed in the grass. "Well?" she asked.

"So glad you asked, Shego!" Drakken reached under the hovercraft's dashboard, flipping himself briefly upside-down in the process, and rifled until he found his next machine. "Say hello to the Juvinator!"

Drakken felt himself beaming from one earlobe to the other, awaiting Shego's praise on his well-chosen weapon. She only flicked her gaze up to her bangs and let it dismiss him.

"You're gonna bribe them with baby toys." The contempt couldn't have been clearer if Shego had spit at his feet.

The Juvinator did look rather like a high-tech baby-stacker, the kind with the rings that spanned the color spectrum, narrowing at the top and broadening toward the base to introduce infants to the concept of size. _That_ resemblance was intentional.

But the moment of equality they had shared on the hovercraft was gone. With her stone eyes, Shego was once again a sidekick rising out of her position, needing to be shoved back.

It made the haughty lift of Drakken's chin easy. "Oh, _do_ try to be sensible, Shego!" he snapped. "I'm going to use it to transform myself into a seventh-grader!"

There was another snort. "Riiiight. 'Cuz my idea was just TOO impractical."

Every cell in Drakken's body strained to ignore her. _The plan is brilliant. I am brilliant. Someday soon, they'll understand._

The rhythm aligned with his heartbeat and his breathing pattern, and Drakken could sense the calming effect already as he picked up the Juvinator and turned his back."I'm going to go change. . . in the bushes," he told her.

"Kaaay?"

"It's going to alter my proportions," Drakken explained. "I haven't tested it, so I don't know -" he could feel his cheeks blossoming pink like the aforementioned sunrise - "what it'll do to the whole 'clothes' situation."

Shego shut her eyes, as if they had reached the grisly portion of a crime-scene program. "Yeah. Really needed THAT in my mind."

Well, _she_ was the one who questioned it.

Drakken stepped behind the tallest scrub of plant life he could find - they were so well-manicured, for once Drakken was happy that he was no bodybuilder - closed his own eyes, took one last breath of the piney outdoorsy scent mingled with the stench of bus exhaust. And he jammed the Juvinator's top button.

 _It didn't hurt_ , was Drakken's first thought. There'd been a tingle, something akin to a minor electrical shock, certainly nothing like the power surges he'd erroneously wound up channeling a few times, and then stretching and popping and now. . .

Drakken squinted his eyes open and almost fell over again. The landscape had changed - even in its clarity, there was something different about the way he was viewing it, as if something heavy rested between his gaze and the horizon. Somewhere in the farthest recesses of his brain, he had a file on it, but it was dusty from. . . from about. . .

He counted forward on his fingers, several times around. About twenty-three years.

The new-old pressure on his nose confirmed it. His glasses. Or - to a serious scholar such as himself - "spectacles."

Drakken slid a tentative tongue over his teeth. It wasn't the effortless back-and-forth he was used to. If that had been the glide of a paintbrush on a wall, this now was more of an attempt to paint a merry-go-round. His tongue swept over several dips and rises before jamming entirely behind a band of metal.

 _It worked._ Drakken could not summon an exclamation point this time.

With equal parts thrill and dread percolating in his gut, Drakken glanced down at himself. He was, thankfully, still clothed - scrawny arms dangled from the sleeves of a black T-shirt with a green alien skull on it. Jeans fell in loose folds away from hips that Drakken had forgotten could get any bonier. From what he could see of his forearms, he knew he was still blue, and his facial skin felt greasy, boiling with a few hotspots. His tie-shoes stuck out in front of him, in the child-size he had never quite managed to outgrow.

He was Drew Lipsky again.

Drew licked a hand and dragged it back over his hair-spikes, all the way down to the half-tail shielding his neck from the world, and he stepped out from behind the bushes.

The world went still enough that he was sure you could hear a butterfly's wing beat. There was only a hiccup as Shego muffled laughter into her palms - reluctantly, as far as Drakken could tell. A grown woman who was clearly not old enough to be a middle-schooler's mother could not afford to draw attention to herself on-campus.

It was an intelligent thing to have noted just then, and that enabled Drew to lift his eyes until they met Shego's. "Don't be fooled, Shego!" he said. "Beneath this unassuming exterior lurks the heart of a bona fide _bully_!"

His voice split in two. Half disintegrated on contact, and the other climbed up the scale and disappeared.

Color whispered at the edges of Shego's cheeks, where it had never appeared before. Restraining a laugh was a greater exertion than mountain-climbing, and Drew was not appreciative. A lesser villain would have been stung.

Drew only took a moment to clear the squeaks from his throat before continuing. "I shall find Kim Possible, and I will not rest until I have made her life thoroughly miserable! Her fledgling adolescent spirit shall be crushed! She will not dare to show up for cheerleading practice, much less tangle with the greatest villains the world has ever known!"

His words _did_ elicit a hungry-lioness smile from Shego. "Crushed Kimmie," she said. "Yeah, that sounds pretty decent to me."

"Exactly." Drew thumped his bulging pocket. "I'll have my cell phone with me at all times, and I'll text you updates. And don't worry - I won't let anyone catch me with it in class."

Shego's eyebrows leveled until they were parallel with her bangs. "Drew" - that was all too easy for her to say - "it's the '90s. They won't have a clue what it even _is_."

"All the more reason to keep it hidden!" Drew said. "It's an anachronism!"

Shego blew out a "WHATever," which Drew also ignored as he took off across the school's lawn, still green with the last of summer. It had always struck Drew as unfair that school had to start up again just when the weather was starting to cool down to the year's loveliest temperatures, ones that begged to be enjoyed. He loved the schoolwork. Hated being cooped up inside with no (literal) wiggle room.

But if it would bleach away the stain that Kim Possible was on his life, it would be well worth it.

Drew slipped in through the double doors. Another gaggle of giggling girls (phew, _there_ was a tongue-twister for you) flocked by as if he were a nonentity, which left Drew ample opportunity to eavesdrop. Every word he heard only cemented the brilliance of his plot.

These girls were anxious, anxious, anxious. They worried that no boy would ever call them on the phone. They were afraid someone named "Bonnie" would be able to tell that their parents had refused to buy them brand-name jeans. They counted the day until their birthdays, when they would finally be allowed to watch PG-13 films.

Somewhere out there, Kim Possible must have been just as flighty as the rest of them. Her sprightly little self-confidence could barely have manifested itself yet - and Drew was planning on running it down with a couple of ice cream trucks before it could.

Ice cream trucks. Why did he say _ice cream trucks_? It should have been drag cars - or whatever those things were Eddy got all excited about - something that would signify the appropriate level of violence he brought -

At any rate, it had another distinct advantage over all of his previous schemes: the most amount of legal trouble he could get into was being sent to the principal. After all the time he served in prison, the so-called threat of the principal's office was stupid at worst, laughable at best. (Though the two terms meant much the same, "laughable" had to be better, Drew thought - because who didn't like to laugh?)

And then his surroundings sank in, and all Drew could think was, _Whoa._

Middleton Middle School was an incredible building, as large and important-looking as it had been back when it was Middleton Junior High. The lockers were set low on the walls to accommodate the students who hadn't hit their growth spurts yet. Shego would have approved of the pine-green walls and the ringlet staircases. The linoleum floor, grayed by years of sneaker soles, rolled off into the distance like an infinite beach. Farther down, the classroom doors punctured the walls as if they'd been shot in with a staple gun - by someone far more dexterous than Drew. (His last encounter with one of those had ended with the little metal fangs biting the tender flesh of his thumb, reflex tears, and Shego rolling her eyes so hard she could've strained an iris.)

Was Room 113 still the science lab? Run by that one teacher, so alive with the beauty of science and the most sympathetic face a preteen boy could ever pray to encounter?

Drew was drawn toward it like a fly to a garbage heap - no - no - like a bee to a clover. (Much more poetic; much more fitting.) She must have been pushing fifty, if she were still there at all, but Drew just wanted to peek in at her. That didn't count as crossing your own timeline, did it?

Whether it did or not, Drew was never sure. His left shoelace came untied, weaseled its way under his right shoe, and he found himself sprawled across the linoleum.

 _Oh BOTHER._

Drew sighed - even that sounded entirely too high-pitched - and brought his foot up to rest on a bench. The old, crumbling stone one that had stood there when he was a student had been replaced by a new, metal-over-plastic one - "mod," as the kids today would say. . .or, well, errr, the kids five years from today. It had been quite awhile since he'd worn tie-shoes, but it came back to Drew quickly. His lamentably small hands, which couldn't snap open the jelly jar or keep a firm grip on the remote, had no trouble looping the laces around each other and pulling them tight.

Giving the ties a proud fluff, Drew took one step forward. And that was when a significantly larger hand came down on his shoulder. "What'cha doin' there, dipstick?" someone demanded.

Drew gave himself credit for not rocketing completely out of his clothes. He only squealed and tumbled backward on the slick surface underneath him, landing on his rump.

The ceiling was an empty, glimmering white.

A pack of boys clustered around Drew as he got to his feet and dusted off his jeans. "I was tying my shoes, not that it's any of _your_ business." Drew tried to shove his way past one of the smaller boys, which only resulted in big arms closing around him from behind and jerking him around to meet a glower.

He didn't have _time_ for this! He had to go find Kim Possible and get right to work on Operation: Spirit Crusher.

"Did your wittle shoewaces break?" asked the biggest boy. He had to be an eighth-grader - and a jock. The first traces of whiskers around his lips. The jersey screaming the name of some team Drew had never heard of. The macho growl coming out of him.

"Oh, come on, guys," Drew said. "Leave me alone. Must we resort to acting like Neanderthals?"

"Did you just call him a caveman, dude?" another boy yelled from somewhere in the pack.

Since when did the bully-jock type boast a working brain?

Drew pulled up to his full height - which, he just now realized, was all of about four-foot-six. "I - I was only commenting on the behav -" he began.

And never finished. The biggest boy seized him by the front, twisting the alien skull. It was, Drew realized crazily, the shirt he had always wanted when he was twelve, but Mother would never buy it - it was too "morbid" for her.

Mother wasn't here now.

So many memories of so many hands lit up and flashed in Drew's brain. He began to tremble from the toes up, unspoken screams rattling in his airways.

There was an audible jeer as the pack closed in. Drew's flailing leg was only good for nailing one kid in the kneecaps. All of them seemed to take the hit, from how they spewed words that Dr. Drakken had only heard a few times before, and then only from fellow felons.

Drew tried to focus on that better-than-average alliteration ( _fel_ low _fel_ ons), tried to trick himself into not noticing how his arms were being locked behind his back. He had a few choice phrases of his own he could have hurled at them, were it not for the fact that his tongue had gone dead. Hard fists closed around his wrists and ankles, and his hair-tail couldn't protect him from the particularly nasty hold it was clutched in. This must have been how it felt to be put in the stocks.

Although surely the stocks were preferable to whatever it was they were preparing to do to him. A wedgie? A swirly? A lunch-money-shakedown? A pantsing?

"Look at 'im. Little wuss," one of them said. His glob of saliva landed an inch from Drew's pinned-down face. The foot he pulled back, Drew could tell from experience, _wouldn't_ miss, no more than the calloused knuckles that had already bounced off his chest.

Drew closed his eyes and was about to curl into a ball - degrading as it most certainly was, he had to protect himself - when someone else was suddenly saying, "Stop, you guys! Leave him alone!"

Whoever it was got a ton of yuks from the boys, but it didn't last long. Drew heard the unmistakable sound of a sneaker against a chin, followed by a glorious groan of pain. There were three heavy thuds, which Drew surmised were the three biggest boys being knocked to the ground, and frantic clomps as the rest of the pack disbanded and ran for their lives. It wasn't long before the bigger ones joined them.

Drew pressed up against the nearest bank of lockers. He was still shaking on an atomic level, and for a moment or two it left no room for humiliation.

It didn't take long for some to find its footing, though. This was both an enormous _yes!_ and a huge _no!_ His rescuer couldn't have been a teacher - they'd be fired, if not arrested, for laying a finger on any of the students.

That meant he'd been saved by another _kid_. And from the swishy-skirt foosteps approaching him, Drew was ninety-nine percent certain it was a _girl_ , to boot. He stayed motionless, hoping against all hope that he'd be beamed up by Mr. Scotty or perhaps just vaporized by Captain Kirk.

At least it couldn't get any worse -

"Hey, are you okay?" the girl asked.

No.

 _I know that voice._

No.

"My name's Kim. What's yours?"

* * *

Dead silence.

Kim kind of wanted to tell the kid that she didn't have any easier questions. The poor guy was already about to shiver himself into oblivion, though. He was _way_ too much like Ron.

She'd thought he _was_ Ron when she'd rounded the corner and found all those jocks clumped together in some nasty version of their halftime-huddle. That always meant they'd found a punching bag.

Taking them down was easy. Those boys were big for eighth grade and in total shape from basketball and stuff, but they still weren't used to Kim's new martial-arts gig - the one that pumped her and doubled her reasons to wake up in the morning. Kim was still catching up with herSELF. She'd always been the girl who had a finger in every extracurricular activity, made practically-perfect grades, and to Bonnie Rockwaller's disappointment, couldn't be pushed off the edge of the cool crowd. Guidance counselors whispered, "Overachiever," like it was a _bad_ thing, teachers used her as an example of a model student, and she was holding her own against the twins in brag-points with Mom and Dad. All of which was delish enough -

Until the day of cheer tryouts. And Mr. Paisley's hit on the site. Both of those were basically the mature equivalent of that day in elementary when you discovered you were finally tall enough to ride the Stomach Twister. When she was cheerleading - and now, when she was saving people - Kim felt like she might actually _be_ someone besides a flat-chested, tinsel-toothed seventh-grader.

She couldn't _remember_ when she'd felt as borderline-smug as when she watched those boys pound their Converse to get away from her. It didn't fade when the gang was gone and Kim glimpsed a head of hair the exact opposite of Ron's staticky blond.

Right now, the kid had his eyes closed and his chin almost tucked into his chest, as if he were having his own personal tornado drill. "Drew," he finally said.

The eye came open, through a lens as thick as a windshield. Its brownness was just a speck off black and spiky-lashed and wobbling with tears. A case of feeling-bad-for-him stirred Kim's heart.

Kim smoothed down the miniskirt she'd spent two weeks convincing Dad to let her buy with her own allowance, scooted in closer to Drew - and her words stuck the landing and fell down in a heap.

No way. No way was this kid _blue_.

Kim caught her lip in mid-curl. Okay - so he was sick. Hurt, maybe. She'd been taking Red Cross classes since she was eight, and she knew, as Ron put it, "six or seven different ways to make people start breathin' again."

She was just about to roll up her sleeves and start one of them when the kid spoke again - this time with exasperation that blasted back in Kim's face like a shower of sand. "I have a skin condition, okay!" he said. Screeched.

Kim saw a flash of silver right before Drew's hand shot up to cover his lips. His head hung in embarrassment, a sign that he totally hadn't learned how to cope with metal-mouth yet.

 _With you on that_ , Kim thought.

She flashed her own braces at him in a show of sympathy. "Does it keep you from doing anything?" she asked. If it did, she was about to be sent on a deluxe, all-expenses-paid guilt trip.

Drew seemed to retreat farther into his baggy outfit. "No, not really. It just keeps me from looking normal."

"Oh, well, then! No big!" Kim gave her wrist a _do-I-seem-sincere-enough?_ flip. As much as she _wanted_ that to be true, this was _middle school_. She was already offering up a prayer of thanks that she didn't have Drew's "condition."

And that made her feel like a grade-A snob. Kim frowned for a second, and then she said, "Are you new? Because I don't remember seeing you around before."

She hoped Drew couldn't hear any hint of _I would have remembered someone like YOU_.

It wasn't just the blueness. Freckles and pimples flecked his face at random, and Ron's weird little pet rat could hang-glide from those ears. Although he wasn't exactly ugly, Kim decided, puberty hadn't been very nice to him.

A short tail of hair flipped up in the back, curled like the tip of a soft-serve ice cream cone. In the so-not-cool category, it was right up there with the specs. Above them, his brows were as fat and black as that stuff Kim had seen boys put _under_ their eyes before they went out to play football.

Rip Snorter and those guys were going to eat him for _lunch_.

Drew nodded slowly, as if his head weighed two tons. "Yes," he said - just as slow. "New. That's it. I'm new."

 _O-kay then._

Kim pushed herself up from the floor and stretched a hand down to Drew. "Hey, you wanna eat lunch with us? We could give you the lowdown on MMS."

Drew stared, loose-jawed and blinking, for almost a full minute. "You _mean_ that?" he said.

"Of course." Kim tossed her ponytail in the direction of the cafeteria. "Come on, I'll show you where our table is."

After another few sink-in seconds, Drew smiled, and his braces glimmered shyly. He was actually kind of cute in a put-together-wrong way when he did that.

Drew shuffled after her as if he was leaving part of himself behind. His body was sort of wonky, like his hands didn't fit his arms and his arms didn't fit his legs. Half the boys in the school had the same look, but the way Drew dragged it around, like a ball-and-chain in one of those old prisoner movies, pretty much advertised him as fresh bait.

Yeah, you'd have to be some kind of stone-cold _Bonnie_ not to feel sorry for him.

"I suppose I'm in your debt, since you saved me from those brutes," Drew said. He was suddenly talking like one of the teachers, and it was just short of hilarious in his only-a-few-squeaks-lower-than-Ron's voice.

"Oh, _please_. SO not the drama," Kim said. _That_ wrist-flip as natural as the organic fruit Mrs. Stoppable insisted on buying. "Don't feel bad. Those guys harsh on everyone."

Drew stuffed his hands into his pockets, thumbs spilling over the sides. All he needed now was one of those cartoon clouds hanging over his head. "I bet they never pick on _you_ ," he muttered, and the teacher-imitation disappeared into something dark.

Actually, he was right. But Kim didn't see any point in saying that, not with Drew hitching his pockets and swallowing so hard his Adam's apple seemed ready to break through the skin. She'd never seen any middle-school boy other than Ron this close to crying, and she didn't have enough experience with _this_ one to have any idea what to do.

Luckily, they were at the cafeteria door a minute later. Drew sloppily wiped his entire face on his sleeve before he entered, and Kim steered him toward the second table from the west window, where Ron was already sitting and folding his napkin into an airplane shape. "Drew, this is my best friend, Ron Stoppable," she said. "Ron, this is Drew -"

"Lipsky," the kid mumbled.

"He's new here," Kim finished.

Ron immediately lit up, the way the puppy across the street did whenever _any_ body walked by. "Hey, Drew!" he said. "My man!" He held out his fist for a knuckle-bump.

Drew's fists, which could probably both fit in one of Ron's palms, hung blankly at his waist, and his backbone cringed. "What does this mean?" he said. To Kim.

She couldn't hold back a grin any longer. "It's just Ron's weird way of saying hello." Kim nudged an elbow into the teddy-bear shirt no one could talk Ron into giving up. "I'm gonna go look at the menu and see if they're actually serving anything edible today."

Ron shot Drew a look that clearly said, _Is there such a THING as bad food?_

Drew gave him one back.

Good. They were going to bond after all.

Kim picked her way through the lunch line, selecting the _least_ icky of today's specials until she had enough foil on her plate to fill Mom's crock-pot. She'd used all of her debate-team-sharpened arguments when she'd gone round and round with the lunch lady _and_ the principal _and_ the school board about how environmentally-unfriendly all of that was, and she'd always gotten the same droning response - it was "cost-effective." Kim gave the lunch lady an eyebrows-up look now to show she wasn't planning on giving up anytime soon as she headed back to Ron and Drew.

Once they'd navigated the line, they came back with heaping trays, which they attacked like the starving orphans in _Oliver Twist_. The two of them together couldn't weigh more than the star basketball forward Kim had just landed an uppercut on.

"So, Drew, dude," Ron said, crumbs spraying as he talked, "how come you're blue?"

"Ron!" Kim heard herself snap. "Ever heard of manners?"

She expected the explanation to blast at Ron, maybe even harder than it had at her. Instead, total confusion swam over Drew's face. He grabbed the fork he didn't need to eat the cafeteria's imitation hamburger and poked it at nothing.

"He has a skin condition," Kim finally answered for him, kicking her foot against Drew's under the table.

Ron nodded as if he understood completely. "Allergies or somethin', huh? That's not so weird. My dad has awful, awful allergies. He swells up like Pop-Pop Porter's blimp and turns super-pink if he even gets _near_ anything with fur. That's how I met this little guy."

He reached into his pocket, and Kim fought an eye-roll. Great. Now they were going to go gaga over the little naked jellybean. Straight into boy-land where she could NOT follow - and it wasn't like she hadn't tried before.

But Drew yelped and backpedaled, threatening to overturn his chair, as Rufus yawned from Ron's palm. It trumped even Bonnie's introduction to Ron's freaky new friend. "What is that?" he said. "It almost looks like a baby - "

"Yup, a baby naked mole rat!" Ron finished for him. He was obviously more delighted than offended as he patted Rufus's wrinkly head. "His name's Rufus."

"Oh, of course," Drew said. "How stupid of me not to have guessed." Kim could see him trying to sneer - and failing miserably. "So - your father's allergies have forced you to consort with hairless vermin?"

Rufus jibbered something Kim would swear was, "Hey!"

"Hey, no hate for the Ruf-meister, 'kay?" Ron waggled his head back and forth. "He's my bro now. Up 'till now, I was what you'd call an 'only child.'" His fingers twitched around the words.

"As am I," Drew said - in the quietest voice yet.

Kim gave a cheerful groan. "You guys are lucky. My little brothers drive me so completely crazy that I want to ship them off to a desert island half the time. Last night, when I was doing my pre-algebra, they -"

"We are _not_ lucky!"

Drew wasn't being quiet anymore. He had a white-knuckled grip on the spoon that he waved in Ron's direction. "Well, maybe _he_ is, but I'm not! My entire family is just me and my mom. Has been for almost. . ." Drew's freckles nearly doubled over on themselves as he counted forward on his fingers. ". . . four years."

He looked at them like he was expecting horror. _Wanting_ it, even. It was hard for Kim. Her parents had been together for going-on-sixteen years, but the number of kids-of-divorce in her homeroom alone would fill up _her_ fingers if she'd counted.

It was Ron who spoke up. "Aww, geez, that tanks. Why parents gotta do stuff like that?" He put his burger down and slid his hand across the table.

Whatever Ron was planning on doing, Drew shook it away. Kim felt a speedy stab at her insides. For a sec, Ron seemed all wise - if you could overlook the teddy bear tee. It only took another sec for Kim to flash back to first grade, when she'd found Hope, one of her now-fellow cheerleaders, crying on the corner of the blacktop because her mommy was moving to another house. Kim hadn't known what to say to her, so she'd organized a game of kickball - Hope's favorite - and insisted everyone let Hope go first.

Why couldn't things be as simple as when they were six?

Like he'd read her mind, Drew whipped toward Kim. "But _you_ ," he said. "I bet you've got the perfect little family, don't you?" It could have been an insult, except that voice was slicing into itself just as much as it was into her.

Honestly, Kim almost wished it _were_ an insult. At least then she'd have a retort.

"Why are you dissin' Kim, dude?" Ron said, gritting the teeth he almost never clamped down. "She's only, like, the nicest kid in the whole school."

 _No, actually, that's you, Ron_ , Kim wanted to say. But it must've touched off something raw inside Drew, because he leaned forward and his shoulders rolled in until they were about to collide. Bitter shame stung his eyes.

"Sorry. I guess I just get a little. . . jealous," Drew mumbled - through a mouth so hurt-shut each word might as well have left behind a new cold sore. "Of normal kids."

Kim stared. The tough-guy act spread around the boys at school like a gorchy case of athlete's foot - and even though most of them weren't too good at it, Kim had never watched one fall apart that fast. And Drew had to be beating himself up for it, if you went by how he punched his fists into opposite armpits.

"So, where did your family move from?" Kim asked - instead of, _What IS your ish?_

And again, Drew didn't answer. Kim looked up to see him playing with a wad of aluminum that some unidentifiable hot-lunch goodie had come wrapped in. His tray was already empty. This kid really _would_ eat anything.

"Yoo-hoo!" Ron waved a hand in front of Drew's blank stare. "Earth to Drew!"

Drew raised his own hand as if to swat Ron away, and then left it lying flattened on the table. "Lots of places," he said, the "places" ten notches higher than the "lots." "I think we were in the Caribbean before we moved here."

"You think?" Ron said. "Man, I'd love to live in the Caribbean. You could have class outside 24/7 - well, I guess it'd be more like 7/5 - but I'd get to rock the beach bod all year 'round." He paused to squint. "The Caribbean's an island, right?"

"It's a - it's a -" Drew failed his arms like some helpless baby bird. "It's a stretch in the ocean. There _are_ many islands there. But enough about me." He swiveled around to face Kim again. "Tell me some more about these brothers of yours."

He sounded super-perky all of a sudden, and Kim wasn't going to question it. Lunch period had been enough of a Stomach Twister already. Besides, hadn't she just been _invited_ to vent about the brat-brains?

"Jim and Tim?" she said. "They are the _worst_. They're only seven, but they've got the brainpower of a couple of super computers, andthey _don't_ use it for good. They reprogram my alarm clock to go off way early, they do 'fabric experiments' on my favorite clothes, and last night - last night I was doing math. _Trying_ to do math, at least. I can't get a handle on this pre-algebra stuff - which of course they've already _mastered_ \- and they were just hovering around me, going, 'Awww, come on, Kim! This stuff is so _easy_! What you do _mean_ you can't figure it out?'"

Kim found herself unwinding as she lifted the bun to inspect her hamburger. At least she wasn't unraveling.

"Interesting," Drew said. He scribbled on a napkin, fascination shining behind those went-out-last-decade glasses of his. "And would you say it crush -"

The five-minutes bell jangled before he could finish. "We'd better finish eating fast," Ron said - around chomps of mashed potatoes. "It's almost time to get to our next class."

Drew poked at the tip of his pencil. "Is our next class math?" he said. There was something almost gleeful about the question. He was a stranger-than-most new kid.

Kim shook her head. "Gym. Don't know what genius thought THAT up - "

She stopped, because Drew had jolted forward in his chair and clutched the table's edge, eyes bugging. It was worse than a deer-in-headlights look. He _was_ the headlights.

"Gym?" Drew squeaked.

And suddenly he didn't look weird at all anymore. He looked like a discolored version of Ron, trembly and pale at the thought of facing whatever disgusting things went down in the boys' locker room.

To be honest, Ron, sporting the grin he never brought out right before gym class, looked _less_ scared than Drew did. "Don't worry, bud," he said happily. "We'll look out for each other, okay?"

"Okay," Drew said in an almost-whisper.

Ron grinned bigger than ever. "Man, this is gonna be great. I never had a locker-room buddy before."

Kim was hit with another pang. That was the one area where she could _not_ help him.

Thank goodness for Drew, weird as he was.

Drew perched like that same baby bird on the edge of his chair and waited for Kim and Ron to finish eating. He stuck right next to them as the three of them stood up to throw their trash away and return their trays. He was pretty much Velcroed to them as they left the cafeteria.

One of the eighth-graders whammed into Drew in the hall, landing him up against the bank of lockers. He let out a cry, and Kim felt her heart quicken with pity - and anger. She amped up the threat-level in her gaze and kept it there until it was time to gender-split.

"And after gym, _then_ do we have math?" Kim could hear Drew saying as he slipped into the locker room behind Ron. His floppy arms were arranged in a fold, going for cynical. Kim thought about warning him that he needed to drop the whole tough-guy thing because he was about as tough as a bowl of rainbow sherbert, but she held back.

She didn't want to crush what was left of this miserable kid's spirit.

* * *

This was not going according to plan.

This was not going according to plan at _all_ , and Drew was sure he could feel goose bumps down the very walls of his throat as he stiffly followed Ron - that was his name, right? Ron? - toward the locker room.

One hour at Middleton Middle, and what had he accomplished? Insulting the naked mole rat, which had had very little effect since apparently Kim Possible hadn't come to love him yet the way she would in the future - well, in the present - well, in the time when he would have a ponytail and she wouldn't. A jab at her perfect family, which had only earned him a very strange look. It was clear Kim Possible didn't think him a bully - she thought him a lunatic.

And for the first time in a long time, Drew Lipsky thought himself a fool.

He should have known better than to accept a lunch invitation. At the sound of those words - "You wanna have lunch with us?" - he should have turned and bolted back down the hall. Except no one had ever said them to him before. He was curious.

The small mental whisper, _I saw my opportunity and seized it! Besides, I_ was _planning to do more to her_ , was precious little comfort. Part of Drew had longed to slump in his seat and plug his fingers with his ears. He hadn't wanted to hear about her wonderful life and her hardworking, probably churchgoing family and her position on the cheerleading squad. The resentment felt like bile in his soul.

But she'd been looking at him so kindly. . .

And he was exactly what those boys in the hallway had called him. A wuss.

And now Drew was entering one of the most perilous places known to mankind - a locker room full of seventh-grade boys. A scale model of prison.

The room swept itself into an ugly hush when Drew and Ron entered. The boy who swaggered over to greet them wasn't as big as the one who'd assaulted Drew in the hall, and his shirtless state displayed his ribs - but also a set of budding pectorals. "What do we got here?" he said. "Look, guys, Loser Boy's found a little loser friend."

There was a chorus of hoots. Another boy muscled his way to the front, this one stripped down to only a pair of plaid boxers, and Drew suddenly realized with his goose bumps icing over that _he_ was probably sporting Spider-Man on his own underwear.

 _I'm an adult_ , Drew reminded himself. The words, factual though they were, were weak and not to be believed. And standing there among them, knobby-kneed and underdeveloped in the midst of their athletic legs and newly emergent chest and armpit hair, he knew that he was three checkpoints behind them in the video game of puberty.

And Ron hadn't even gotten his console plugged in yet.

That was why it surprised Drew when Ron grinned, knocking his face back another three to five years. "I dunno about that," he said. "We don't even know what the game is yet, so how can we tell who wins or who loses?"

A general disbelief fell, and during it, Drew seriously considered distancing himself from Ron, attempting to join the tormentors. It was the only semi-villainous thing to do. And yet it would do no good - Kim Possible's spirit, like an equation with a negative slope, rose the more beaten-down her little friend was. Besides, to break up an alliance while still in enemy-occupied territory was stupid, and Drakken had met his quota of stupidity for the day.

It was time to behave in a manner befitting the genius he was.

"Aw, come on, Stoppable," Boxer Boy scoffed. "When have you ever won anything in your life?"

 _Stoppable_. Yes, the name did have a familiar ring to it.

"You know," Drew said, "being able to play sports doesn't raise your IQ. It doesn't make you a decent person. It won't always land you in a position of leadership. It's not good preparation for the real world."

Hating the fractures in his voice, Drew jerked his head back toward Ron for support. But the kid appeared to be in some kind of trance, until all at once he thrust out a finger and cried, "Yeah! And ya know, I did win the ring toss game at the carnival last year! And everyone knows those things are rigged!"

Even without the aid of a mirror, Drew could tell how badly his cheeks were blotching.

Before any of the boys could even start toward them, though, someone else cried from the corner, "Hey, check this out! Reiger here's got a sunburn on his _butt_!"

Ron and Drew were quickly forgotten as the boys stampeded over to "check out" that unfortunate child's backside. For once Drew was glad; for once it was better to be ignored.

"C'mon, Drew," Ron said. He tugged Drew toward a curtained stall. "In here. While they're distracted."

Drew threw a terrified glance at the stall door. Was this the one with the lock that always came unfastened right at the moment you finally got up the nerve to strip your shirt off - or worse? It appeared shinier and more silvery-bright than the one he'd relied on in his youth, but who could know if it had been replaced or just polished?

"Come _on_." Ron gave Drew a light shove to the back, and Drew waited for old-man pain that never came. "Go in there, and I'll guard you while you change, and then you can do the same thing for me."

Drew twisted around to look straight into Ron's eyes. "Really?" he said. "You would - you would do that for me?"

Ron shrugged merrily. "Like I said - I always wanted a locker room buddy."

It was ridiculous to trust him; however, for lack of other options, Drew was forced to do so. He walked into the shower stall and pulled the lock into place behind him. There was a creak as Ron's weight leaned against it to keep it shut.

Drew sighed to himself as he pulled off his shirt. His chest was so narrow that it looked like his lungs were sucking themselves in to conserve air and as smooth as Ron's rat friend, with only a downy layer of delicate hair. He'd seldom seen more a disheartening sight. His gym T-shirt went on quickly.

Next came the change into shorts. Complete with the expected Spider-Man boxers. Drew was afraid to look at the tag, afraid to see the size, afraid that his mother would have stitched "Drew Lipsky" - if not "Drewbie Lipsky" - onto it as an identifier, so it couldn't get mixed up with some other pint-sized -

The knob rattled from the outside. Drew was about to jump out of the shorts he'd just wiggled into when Ron hissed, "It's just me. Hurry up before they come back, okay?"

Drew wanted to say something in agreement, but his mouth had turned into the Sahara Desert. And the Sahara Desert didn't talk, except to those poor lost souls gone mad from thirst. He just tied his gym shoes - another skill he'd learned late - and exited the stall, switching places with Ron, propping himself against the door. Drew tried to whistle casually, to no avail.

The Sahara Desert didn't whistle, either.

Ron was faster than Drew would have expected from him. He was in and out of the stall in under a minute, giving Drew a high-five and saying, "All right, let's do this thing."

Drew stared, stunned, at his palm. Its nerves still held the imprint of a tender grip he'd never known before. When it faded from his tactile memory, he felt empty.

 _Please not the physical fitness test_ , Drew begged whatever higher being was in charge of P.E. schedules. _Please - I haven't done a chin-up in twenty -two years. . ._

Mercy was granted - Drew supposed. It was not chin-ups, but basketball. There was the humiliating picking of teams - teachers _still_ hadn't figured out what that did to a child's morale? - that left Drew hugging the wall, facing the rolling eyes of the unlucky team fated to choose him for their last player. Even Ron had been accepted with less reluctance, likely due to his lanky-legged advantage.

Well, despite the fact that they were on opposing teams, Drew planned to stick close to Ron for the rest of the period. They alternated warm-up stretches together to make sure someone was always on the lookout for large wedgie-giving hands. They took breaks on the same bench, shared gulps from Ron's water bottle. They gave each other thumbs'-up before heading back into the fray.

At one point, someone actually passed the ball to Ron. Though he looked ready to have a conniption on the spot, the kid got it together enough to shoot up for a dunk. But he'd figured the ball's trajectory wrong, and it clunked off the backboard and bounced straight toward Drew's team.

Its angle as it hit the ground automatically grafted itself into Drew's brain. He knew right where it would end up - _thanks to the power of science! I'll prove them all wrong!_

Unfortunately, his show of genius didn't really bump him up the two inches it felt like it ought to. The ball sailed right between Drew's straining fingertips, and he pumped himself backward in one final bid for success - and the slick gym floor slid right out from beneath him, landing Drew hard on his rear.

The crowd roared. Before the couch could even reach for his whistle - not that Drew saw with his slightly doubled vision, at least - Ron got there, reached a hand down to him, and hauled him back up. For a half-instant, the kid's face was soft and understanding before he took off after the rebound, tripping over himself along the way.

They still got laughed at a lot, but at least there were two of them.

Drew was especially grateful for that once they were commanded to hit the cool-down showers before their next class. He would have clung to Ron's hand in the locker room if he hadn't been acutely aware of how much worse it would make things.

After four minutes of standing guard outside Ron's curtain, Drew started to drift into daydreams. He wouldn't have blamed that Reiger kid if he skipped gym for the rest of his school career. . . and he wondered what Past Drakken was doing back in his lair right at this moment. . . and he didn't notice another form much bigger than his own dart in beside him.

Not until the curtain snapped with a _swish-thwap_ and then a pained cry from Ron. Drew didn't need to see the red-raised welt to recognize The Lash Of The Rolled-Up Wet Towel. It was a sound that had haunted him even after graduation.

 _And on my watch, too! What kind of a friend am I?_

Ngggk. He really needed to get a grip. He was not Stoppable's friend; he was his mortal enemy, and Stoppable should've been the only one of the duo foolish enough to not grasp that.

"You guys really need to come up with some new tricks," Drew said, the chance to put the jocks in their place (probably) his only incentive. "They were doing that when I was in - "

Foreheads puckered.

"- _sixth_ grade," he finished feebly, grabbing his own change of clothes while they were still stunned into inertia.

Great. He'd almost said _when I was in middle school. The first time. Thirty years ago._

As he stepped into the stall to shower and change, Drew could almost hear Shego's slow, degrading clap.

He'd just buttoned his blue jeans back on when something vibrated from the pocket. It was his phone with a text message. Speak of the sidekick. . .

 **Where are you?** The letters poked at Drew like demanding fingers. **Making any progress yet?**

Gulp.

 **Technical difficulties** , Drew sent back. **But I'll get to her in math class. Promise!**

With every one of those exclamation points still resounding in his head, Drew peeked out the curtain to make sure the coast was clear and helped a now-dressed Ron limp to the door. He wished he'd ever been able to isolate which mysterious property of Kim Possible's gave her such an air of superiority - the quality of being, as she would say, "so over it."

Hopefully it was still in its infant stages.

"So - do we have math class after this?" Drew asked as he tagged along beside Ron.

"Well, yeah. I mean, it's not _right_ after this, but it's after this. Last period."

Last period. Shego was not known for her patience. He'd be cutting it close - but - but, oh think of it, the great Kim Possible, stymied by pre-algebra!

An intelligent person's lack of prowess in a single subject could make the perfect spirit-crusher.

"So, what _is_ our next period?" Drew asked. He heard himself squeal with excitement, yet managed to refrain from bouncing on his heels and thus sacrificing his casualness entirely.

"Language arts."

Ron shrugged as he said it, and _his_ casualness made a casual _ty_ of Drew. Everything inside him ceased to function, and he had to grab at the sides of his hair to determine he was still a living organism.

It _would_ be language arts.

The word was _irony_ , and it vexed Drew to the bone - because he couldn't quite recall how to spell it.

* * *

As usual, Kim was in Room 1748 and at her desk two minutes before the warning bell rang. Still breathing hard from the laps she'd run - though they were getting easier every day - she tapped a pencil into its slot at the top of the desk and arranged her _Structure of the English Language_ textbook and spelling-slash-vocab book below it. Half of last week's words had looked like they belonged on one of Mom's med charts, but after finishing every lap in first place, Kim was in a major bring-it mood.

Someone soapy-smelling came in and flopped into the seat behind her the way only one person could do. Kim could recognize Ron just from the frantic slamming around inside his desk for his books and the avalanche of pages turning because his getting-too-big-for-him fingers couldn't grab any LESS than ten at a time.

"Last second, right on cue," Kim hissed to him without turning around.

"The Ron-man's got it nailed to the _wall_ , KP."

"How was gym class?" Kim said.

She could hear Ron's shrug rattling against the back of his chair. "Slightly less traumatizing than usual."

It always broke Kim into a grin whenever Ron came out with a four-syllable word. Too bad they fell apart in his throat whenever a teacher was within six feet. Maybe hanging out with geeky little Drew all day would actually drive them deep enough into Ron's brain for him to wow Mrs. Yen.

Kim glanced around the room for the new kid and found him in the back row. He had one arm flung lazily across the back of the chair and both of his still-twitchy feet hitched onto the book rack beneath it, ruining the nonchalant act with way too much energy.

"So - you guys watched each others' backs in gym?" Kim asked Ron.

"Yeah. He seems nice." Kim could imagine Ron tilting his head. "Weird, but nice."

 _Just like you_ , Kim was about to reply, when Mrs. Yen stepped to the front of the room and clapped her hands until the chalk dust from her last class flew up around her like smoke signals.

"All right, boys and girls," she began, and Kim could feel the unanimous held-back groan across the room. That was a phrase that even rubbed wrong against the twins, and they still ran around the house in their underwear half the time. "Today, we will be working on our spelling and vocabulary words. Please open your books to Lesson Two on page 20. Copy down each word and its definition."

Kim took another look around the room. Bonnie did everything but yawn to show what a cakewalk THAT was going to be for her. Drew was looking more green than blue. Ron Reiger had his knees drawn up under him to support his weight while he turned a shade of flaming red to match his hair.

Personally, Kim was up there with Bonnie - just minus the whole being-a-snot-about-it part, Kim hoped with all her heart. Copying down spelling words was a major bore, but it didn't pose any threat to her GPA.

By the time Kim ended her last letter with a cheerleader-flourish, only twenty-five minutes of class time had ticked by. She swiveled toward Ron and formed the "okay?" sign with her fingers and got an upturned thumb in response. Ron didn't exactly have what you'd call a knack for spelling, but he was fine as long as the words were right there in the book.

Kim turned back around and fingered the first word at the top of her paper. _Metamorphosis._ _A process of great change, such as a caterpillar becoming a butterfly or a tadpole becoming a frog._

 _Like all of us_ , Kim thought.

That was good for yet another pan of the room. Legs were longer than they'd been at the end of sixth grade. Girls who _weren't_ Kim were starting to develop actual figures. Boys' voices squawked like the recorders nobody could play back in music class, but at least you could tell them apart from the girls' now. They were all awkwardly wedged into a cocoon, somewhere between chubby caterpillars and graceful butterflies, together, and -

And - _sheesh_ \- how corny was that? Kim would've been laughed right out of the locker room - and off the cheer squad - if she'd come out with a line like that while Bonnie was flaunting her brand-new curves.

Even now, Kim threw a quick glance over her shoulder to make sure she hadn't somehow triggered Bonnie's uncool sensors. Bonnie sat with her arms folded across her tank top. When Kim's gaze met hers, Bonnie flung her hands down over her finished paper and stabbed Kim with a look meant to melt her lip gloss.

Yeah. That was the major diff between them and butterflies.

Behind Bonnie, Drew dug through his already-standing-on-end hair. He was staring at his notebook like he had a stomachache - which was totally possible after a cafeteria hot lunch. The eraser end of his pencil scrubbed back and forth, and Drew squeaked a grunt when it tore a hole straight through the paper.

Mrs. Yen looked at Drew as if he'd been caught playing the backpack-belly-bump the boys hadn't figured out yet was SO elementary and tapped her finger to her lips.

 _Sure. Don't go help him or anything._ Kim was surprised at how sour her own thoughts were, and she instantly fixed politeness on her face.

As soon as Mrs. Yen's back was turned, though, Kim strolled to the back row and squatted down beside Drew's desk. "Is everything okay?" she said.

Drew frowned down at her. His eyes were red and runny, and Kim wondered if he might seriously be sick. Especially when he moaned and smothered his miserable face with his hands.

"What's the problem?" Kim said.

"I'm stupid in Language Arts, okay?"

The words were probably meant to be hard and edgy. Instead, they sounded like Drew was getting his tonsils yanked out right where he sat.

Kim clamped her mouth shut over the _Are you kidding?_ that fought to get out and looked at Drew's paper. Even under the eraser-film, she could make out several manglings of _metamorphosis_. There was _meatmorphosis_ , _metaphormaus_ , and _metamorohpsis_ , practically carved into the paper with a forlornly dull pencil.

"You're allowed to look at the spelling in the book, you know," Kim said.

"I know!" Drew said. His cheeks were the color of bubblegum, one particularly nasty pimple flaring red. "And I _am_ looking at the book! But somewhere between the book and my pencil - everything gets mixed-up and turns out backwards and upside-down. Logically speaking, it can only be the middleman who's the dunce!"

 _Wow._

"Look, anyone who can even think to use the words 'middleman' and 'dunce' isn't one, okay?" Kim adopted the tone Mom used when she had to ground the twins for the third time that week. "You said everything turns out backward?"

Drew nodded.

Kim crouched closer to his paper. "And it looks like the letters get scrambled around - because you obviously know what you're trying to write."

Another nod.

"Then - it looks like you just have dyslexia," Kim said.

Drew went from blue-green to dead-white. "What's that?" he said. "A disease? Is it fatal?"

Panic was spiraling his words straight up toward the ceiling, and Kim would've dragged it back down with her fingernails if she had to. "No," she said. "The teachers call it a 'learning disability.' It's just something that makes it hard for your brain to arrange letters and numbers in the right order for some reason. You read them backward."

Drew sagged against his desk. "So I _am_ stupid."

"Uh, no again," Kim said. She did a quick check for any sign that Mrs. Yen was paying attention and saw her engrossed in her grade book. "Dyslexia isn't a low-IQ thing, from what I've heard. Tons of major-smart people have it. They think even Leonardo da Vinci might've been dyslexic, because he wrote backward half the time, and he was, like, this total brainiac."

"The leading mind of the Renaissance," Drew agreed in a whisper. "He would write backward, and they didn't call him stupid?"

Kim let out the "Are you kidding?" this time as she shook her head. "They just chalked it up to the whole kooky-genius thing."

Drew stared at her for what felt like ages before he blinked at a smile at her. It was shaky and timid and happy-go-lucky all at the same time. And it sloppily invited Kim to smile back at it, which she couldn't help doing.

Just as suddenly as the frown had disappeared, it came back and Drew directed it down at the paper so savagely eraser-scratched that his next attempt would probably tear a hole straight through it. "What's the cure?" he said.

Kim nibbled at her bottom lip. The kid looked so unbelievably earnest, his eyes perfect circles behind the headlight-lenses, she might've guffawed right out loud if it hadn't been so darn sad. "There's no 'cure.' I mean, you're not _sick_."

Drew flung his head beneath his wadded-up arms and muttered something into their baggy sleeves.

"Sorry, that was a _total_ did-not-catch," Kim said.

Drew rearranged his fold so that his head was on top, and he tipped it toward Kim. "Then what _am_ I supposed to do?" he said.

Kim said, "I don't know" - three words that pained her more than any other combo in her vocabulary.

"You don't _know_?" Drew repeated. The only thing that kept Kim out of Humiliation Nation was the fact that his jaw was about to fall off its hinges.

Huh. She could _so_ get used to this whole "trust-in-Kim" thing.

"No. I don't," Kim made herself say. She stood back up and brushed at the imprint the carpet had left on her knees. "But you know who I bet _does_ know? Mrs. Yen."

Doubt all but gathered over Drew's head like one of those old-time cartoon clouds.

Kim didn't care. She was already halfway back up the aisle, spinning a silky speech inside. Mrs. Yen was "not very understanding" - which was Mom's polite way of calling her a big ol' grouch - but it was her _job_ to recognize the difference between a stupid kid and a dyslexic one.

One of Mrs. Yen's carefully-lined eyebrows lifted when Kim reached her desk. "Do you need something, Kim?" she said in a whisper pinched with annoyance.

"Sorry to bother you," Kim said. "But it's that new kid, Drew, in the back. He's - "

"He's making too much noise for you to concentrate, isn't he?" Mrs. Yen interrupted. Her hardened-syrup voice climbed down the back of Kim's neck.

"No. That isn't it. That isn't it at _all_." Kim paused to get her breathing back into the I-can- _so_ -do-this zone before she added, "He's just having a lot of trouble with the assignment. And I'm ninety-nine percent sure it's because he's dyslexic."

Mrs. Yen pointed her red pen straight toward Drew like a way-long extension of her fingernail. "That little dark-haired boy in the back row?"

"Yeah, that's him." In her mind, Kim gave Mrs. Yen _some_ credit for not referring to him as "the blue one."

Mrs. Yen's face softened a fraction. She rose from her desk and floated, classy as an aging cheerleader, to the back row, where she squatted to talk to Drew. Judging from the brittle knot he formed with his lips, dependable teachers hadn't been a big part of his school experience up 'til now.

It flew Kim back down the aisle and hovered her over Mrs. Yen's head until the teacher sighed heavily and said, "Thank you, Kim. I believe I can do this without your help."

"Oh, it's no big," Kim said. "I've already finished my work, and I'd be happy to -"

"Miss Possible." Mrs. Yen's forehead flattened. The bulgy vein would be next.

Much as Kim hated to admit it, her _I-can-do-anything_ instincts lost out to the _I've-never-had-a-detention-in-my-LIFE_ ones. She hustled back to her own seat, where she checked and re-checked the word list until it stopped looking like words at all. It was a freaky-weird feeling, and she wondered if Drew felt it every time he looked at an assignment.

Yikes. No wonder the kid acted like he had a family of mice living in his clothes.

Kim took another backward peek at him just to make sure Mrs. Yen wasn't reading him her infamous riot act.

Nope. He was nodding slowly as Mrs. Yen talked him through how to cover each word with a Kleenex and peel it back one letter at a time so he could keep track, and the knot had relaxed into an _O_ of awe. It was as satisfying a sight as the bad guy _you'd_ defeated being hauled off in cuffs.

When Drew looked up and caught Kim looking at him, she shot the "okay?" sign his way. He responded by sliding down on the tip of his tailbone, his lanky arms jammed into a cross that they couldn't seem to find the ends of.

 _Strange kid._

 _Out-weirded only by my best friend._

She turned her attention back to Ron, who'd finally made it through the first half of the list. His tongue crept out and stayed there while he mouthed the next word to himself and copied it one lopsided letter at a time. Rufus sat in the paper's margins and jibbered, apparently serving as Ron's proofreader.

Meanwhile, Bonnie had finished copying and obviously wasn't dying for another assignment. She'd managed to sneak a compact out of her skintight pocket and get to work applying bronzer that, as far as Kim could tell, she didn't need. Her tan glowed with a brand of normal that left Kim cold.

Even though Kim would've gladly forked over a month's worth of allowance to look as exceptional and sophisticated as Bonnie did right that second.

* * *

 **Seriously, Dr. D - have you made ANY progress yet?**

 **Ran into some more technical difficulties.** Drew poked out the letters, fingers still damp and shivery from the class he'd just exited. Mrs. Shush Lips had turned out to be a valuable mentor, schooling him in ways to read that were less likely to tangle the text in his brain. But he couldn't tell _Shego_ that he'd had his first positive Language Arts experience since the Nixon administration - or about the dyslexia diagnosis. Kim Possible had said it as if it were so obvious - not even snidely; what was up with that? - that surely Shego would lay into him for not having figured it out before now.

Logically speaking, Drew couldn't fault her for wanting to burn him at the stake on charges of incompetence. The blaze in his own chest threatened to incinerate him from the inside out first.

Still, when Shego's next text came up, Drew decided to go ahead and fault her anyway.

 **Have you considered that this plan is NOT going to work? Just like ALL the others?**

The words stung like a swarm of mutant yellow-jackets. Drew wondered vacantly why he hadn't developed an immunity by now.

 **No, Shego, it** _ **is**_ **going to work,** Drew texted back. **I've been biding my time until afternoon classes started. Believe me, math class shall be her downfall!**

It was Shego he sent it to, of course, though Drew could see how he would benefit from believing his own prognosis. He had to get over his petty feelings of companionship and strike his foe down at the very place she'd been gullible enough to take him under her wing.

Not that Kim Possible had wings. Up until today, that had been about the only weakness she'd even shown him.

Drew pocketed his anachronistic cell phone before anyone else could catch a glimpse and resumed his surveillance of the hall from a leaning-against-the-lockers position. It wasn't an observatory with a high-res telescope, but it would do for now.

 _Those_ boys, the whole pack of them, were playing some version of soccer with the lunch box of the only dimwit who still brought one. Drew's blood itched for the kid. The other boys, normal ones, simply punched each other on the arms and burped and generally flaunted their immaturity. A group of girls flocked around the water fountain to examine their nails and gossip. Kim Possible, contrary to Drew's expectations, stood a few feet apart from those girls, watching them with a veiled sense of something in her eyes. If he wasn't mistaken, it was caution.

Drew didn't know how big his grin had grown before he recalled his mission and hid it behind a hand. So the great Kim Possible had some social anxiety after all! This was going to be more of a breeze than he'd imagined.

Yes, it just took some patience, and your quarry would wander right into your trap. Just like they'd said on _Animal Planet_.

It was easier to swagger into the Mathematics room now that he wasn't lugging around the ten-ton weight of an impossibility. Stoppable wasn't in this class. The brunette cheerleader with the glossy sneer _was_.

Perfect.

Drew found a seat - in the front row this time - and sank into it, arranging his fingers in a scholarly fold on the desktop and made a point not to look too smug. That was no small task when you were so close to global conquest you could _smell_ it, and the odor was like that of a Halloween bucket full of candy. That childhood scent of compact plastic combined with every variety of mouth-watering sugar you could imagine -

The teacher bounded to the front of the room, as different from Mrs. Shush-Lips as another woman could be. She was wearing one of those cute little jumpers that everyone liked back in the '90s - well, back in the now - and under it was a smiley shirt that matched her expression perfectly, except in a neon color. Not even Dementor's skin had that bright a yellow cast to it. A plus sign dangled from one ear, a minus sign from the other.

Drew liked her right away.

All right, why was he getting into the habit of liking people? That had to stop. Sudden panic assaulted Drew. Could it be that the Juvinator actually regressed you emotionally, and he was _becoming_ his lonesome twelve-year-old self?

 _Okay. Okay. In and out, in and out, in out in out in out. I can still do this!_

After all, even as Drew Lipsky he'd had a mean little heart. The things he had wished on those jock bullies in the labyrinthine curves of his mind where no one could see them -

Drew yanked his gaze over to the nameplate on the teacher's desk. _Ms. Dayrumple._ It fit her.

"All right, class," Ms. Dayrumple said. "We're going to have some more fun with balancing equations today." She stuck out her tongue and crossed her eyes at the groan that spread around the room like a quick-growing fungus. "And we'll also be looking at how this will carry over into the science you learn this year, next year, and into high school."

Drew sat on top of his fists so he wouldn't punch them into the air victoriously. It may not have been global conquest - yet - but it was a close second.

"Kim, why don't we start with you? Come on down to the board." Ms. Dayrumble said it as though she were selecting Kim Possible to compete on a game show with fabulous cash winnings.

The peachy-pink color seemed to drain right out of Kim Possible. Nevertheless, she pasted on a smile and gave her hair an all-too-familiar flip. Trying to raz-dazzle her way out of it, no doubt. Drew was surprised she didn't simply deliver a roundhouse kick, as seemed to be her answer to any problem.

His abdomen ached with remembered blows and a shiny new resolve. It was official: from now on, he was going to cut Kim Possible as much slack as Shego had ever cut him (which was a decimal percentage, at best).

Drew zeroed in on Kim Possible as she picked her way up to the chalkboard. He couldn't counterfeit utter boredom with numbers and formulas around, but a hefty dose of superiority settled in and made itself at home.

Ms. Dayrumple chalked _x - 2 = 7_ on the board. Drew had it mentally figured out before she'd even finished drawing the _7_ 's leg.

Kim Possible, on the other hand, stared at it for a solid minute, one foot tapping the floor as though sending out an SOS to someone who might be able to tell her the answer. But this wasn't _Who Wants To Be a Millionaire?_ and there was no lifeline at her disposal. Drew licked his chops.

Finally, Kim Possible picked up the chalk herself and wrote, in much daintier strokes than the samples of her handwriting Dr. Drakken had seen over the years - _x = 5._

Drew snorted right out loud.

Kim Possible didn't even turn to trace the noise. She just lifted a face struggling to remain optimistic to Ms. Dayrumple. "That's not right, is it?" she almost whispered.

"No, I'm afraid it's not." It couldn't have been less of a scolding had Ms. Dayrumple handed her a free cookie. Too bad. The teacher turned to the class, fiddling with her minus earring. "Can anyone help Kim fix this?"

All other thoughts fled from Drew's brain. He stuck his entire arm into the air and waved it back and forth so frantically he almost lost his balance.

"Yes, you?" Ms. Dayrumple pointed at him, and Drew's pulse raced through every major artery. "What's your name?"

"Drew," he said offhandedly. He didn't see the need to add the "Lipsky" in front of this crowd of torpedoes just waiting to be launched.

"Come on up then, Drew."

 _With pleasure._

It was yet another thing to boil inside Drew as he sauntered masterfully to the board. He'd blurted his last name by mistake during lunch, only realizing after the fact that it was one Kim Possible might recognize. She hadn't; looked at him with a complete blank slate. Her father had never gotten around to mentioning him.

Behind Drew, a couple of the self-appointed cool boys were hunched together in their middle-row desks, snickering to each other, eyes glittering at the wrong answer on the chalkboard, big apelike hands poised to clap. It reminded him of the way they encouraged each other into taking slam dunks in PE, even if they were yards away from the hoop.

Every single goading smile said, _Slam dunk 'er, Drew - for the men!_

Chalk dust turned to dingy water in the lines of Drew's palms. This was it - even more of an _it_ than he could have hoped. One well-timed blow, and he'd shatter Kim Possible's spirit, demonstrate his genius to the field of doubters, _and_ cement his status as "one of the guys," as they said on TV sitcoms. The only way it could have been more perfect was if _his_ father -

Drew jerked back to Kim Possible. Her hands were hanging at her sides, her eyes downcast, bearing no resemblance at all to his feisty, fiery-tongued nemesis. She was as vulnerable as a kitten whose claws hadn't hardened yet.

And he was a bad, bad junkyard dog.

Well, a junkyard pup.

No - he had it now - maybe he was a vet, brandishing declawing instruments without any anesthesia in sight!

Drew leaned forward and left a chalky handprint on the board. Wishing he had the height advantage and willing his vocal chords not to flee for higher grounds, he hissed, "Bet it makes you feel pretty stupid, doesn't it?"

* * *

All Kim could do was blink. The " _excuse_ me?" she wanted to say fizzled out and died from serious disbelief.

Drew twisted a glance back at the jocks, who had their bodies tilted his way and wore grins they could've snatched off a pack of hyenas. He looked like one of those guys in the horror movies Mom and Dad didn't know she'd seen, trying to decide whether or not to sell his soul. That was when Kim got it, and the air she took in tasted bitter.

 _Really, Drew?_

"What does?" Kim said, doing her perky-best to keep her voice light.

Drew gulped, and Kim watched the Adam's apple crank up and down. His head started to turn toward the jocks again, and then it stopped and scrunched itself down toward his shoulders as if he were trying to squirm out of one of Aunt June's hugs.

"The school system," he finally said. The last syllable jumped for the ceiling. "You can be perfectly brilliant in all other areas, but the second they find something you don't have an aptitude for, they might as well stick you in a dunce cap for life!"

Kim blinked again. She wouldn't have put it so dramatically, but -

"I catch you," she said. "And it tanks. Because you and I - we're _so_ not stupid."

"Hey, why don't you two get a room already?" said a boy-shout.

Ms. Dayrumple got to him before Kim could, and he got off easy with a finger-snap and a stern scribble on one of the fifty Post-It notes that littered her desk. Kim didn't dare scan the room this time. She could already imagine Bonnie's lip somewhere around her forehead, and Marcella and Liz trying to giggle their way into her approval, and Tara looking at Kim with pity thick enough to gag you.

Maybe she understood Drew better than she'd thought.

 _He_ currently looked like he wanted to crawl right under the carpet. Like, there was actual forehead-against-the-heels-of-his-hands action. He'd obviously given up on any hope of saving face.

Kim took a sec to appreciate Dad and his constant corny pep talks.

"So," she nodded toward the board, "are we gonna fix this or not?"

Drew stared at her like she'd just offered him backstage passes to _the_ concert of the season. "Yes," he mumbled. "Yes, right, well, fixing. . ." He held out his palm for the chalk and then squeaked it across the board. "It looks like you were attempting to solve the equation by applying the 'minus two' to both sides. It's a common mistake among amateurs."

He sounded so over-the-top snooty, it would've been insulting if his voice hadn't matched the chalk squeal for squeal. As it was, Kim could barely keep a straight face.

"What you _want_ to do," Drew said, "is get _x_ by itself. And so you have to get rid of the 'minus two.' To do that, you'll need to _add_ two. Minus two and plus two, of course, add up to zero, so we can forget about that." He drew "+2" under the "-2" and then crossed the whole thing out.

Kim held back a sigh. That left her with _x_ being equal to seven, and it was a big _duh!_ that THAT wasn't right.

Drew must have been able to read that on her, because he added, "But we're not done yet! Next we add two to the _other_ side of the equation." His fingers flew across the board with the first bit of confidence Kim had seen in him, and it made her immediately want to be as good at this as he was.

Seeing the potential in that made it less mortifying to ask, "Where did we get _that_ 'plus two'?"

Drew's chest shrunk as if he were holding back a huff of his own. "Because whatever we do to one side of the equation, we have to do to the other side, as well."

Kim nodded, hoping _I-get-it_ would pounce on her by the time she stopped.

Drew's too-nice-for-a-guy's eyelashes flicked downward, then pointed back up with an idea. "Think of them like your little brothers. You must do the exact same thing to each of them, or they'll start whining about it not being fair. Just call one side - err, what are those children's names again?"

"Jim and Tim."

"Perfect!" Drew scrawled _Jim_ on side of the equals sign and _Tim_ on the other. "Only you can prevent this tantrum, Kim Possible!" he added, his arms windmilling in the air.

It was all definite overkill. Who really cared at this point, though?

Kim refused to close her eyes in front of the whole class, but she was able to blank her vision so that she only saw what she wanted to picture - herself dropping two pieces of candy into Jim's sticky seven-year-old hand, and Tim rearing up for a scream because if Jim got two, _he_ got two. Sure, it was the dorkiest thing since clip-on ties -

She nudged the chalk from Drew's hand and walked up to the board, taking in the identical set of "plus two"s. Back straightened, Kim wrote _x = 9._

You would've thought she'd explained the Unified Field Theory, the way Ms. Dayrumple shone at her. "And that, Kim, is absolutely correct," she said.

Kim resisted the urge to shake imaginary pom-poms in the air. Nah, instead she turned to Drew and gave him her biggest grin. "You _rock_ , Drew."

 _It might be just as uncool - but at least it's quieter._

The kid blushed. Not a crushing-on-you blush - more like the kind that was flabbergasted to be noticed in the first place. The second Ms. Dayrumple gave them permission to sit down, Drew bolted for his desk as fast as an Olympic sprinter.

"All right, this next one is a two-stepper. A little trickier." Ms. Dayrumple wrinkled her nose as she looked at the class. "And, Bonnie, you've been so quiet today -"

 _If only._

" - why don't you come on up here and work this one out?"

Bonnie turned on the cheerleader-charm and cranked it to the max. The same way Kim had, only her teeth weren't strung with wires and rubber bands, and her hair kickflipped like a pro before landing in perfect symmetry on either side of her face.

Kim felt nasty-sick for a minute.

It didn't work. With obvious exasperation, Bonnie flounced herself to the board and took the chalk in the between-the-fingers hold most people reserved for dead fish. _I am NOT going to need Nerd Boy's help up here_ , was sizzling all over her face.

And she didn't. Bonnie got through the "two-stepper" - in the correct order, no less, and Ms. Dayrumple didn't seem to think it was a lucky guess. She exclaimed, "Wonderful job!" while Bonnie stood there with her arms flowing to her hips like a walking ad for Club Banana.

"There are really only three things you need to remember for basic pre-algebra," Ms. Dayrumple said after she sent Bonnie back to her seat. "First of all - you'll want to get _x_ by itself." She wrote the words on the board while she said them, and half the class read along, the boys doing some sort of warbles in their throat that sounded absolutely nothing like Ms. Dayrumple.

No way was Kim getting in on _that_ action. She opened her math notebook to the first clean page and jotted it down in the shorthand she'd begged Dad to teach her.

"Once _x_ is alone on one side of the equals sign, you'll know you have your final answer." Ms. Dayrumple thumped her jagged-cursive sentence with the chalk before moving down to start another. "Secondly, as Drew pointed out, whatever you do to one side of the equation, you have to do to the other. You can subtract two, multiply ny three, add one hundred - you have the power to do whatever you want to this equation, as long as you do it to both sides."

Too bad Ron wasn't here. He would've gotten a kick out of that. Kim could already imagine him multiplying everything up into the millions just because he could - and then getting himself totally lost.

"And third, remember the order of operations," Ms. Dayrumple said. "This gets a little more complicated once you get into full-strength algebra, but for now all you need to know is that adding and subtracting come before multiplying and dividing."

Kim added the exclamation points she always tacked on to a _you-must-remember-this_ tip.

"And now the biggest question of all is," Ms. Dayrumple gave the class another nose-wrinkle, "why does any of this matter? How's it ever going to help us in real life?"

A lanky blue arm shot up and waggled back and forth.

Ms. Dayrumple passed her hand across her mouth like she was shooing away a smile. "Yes, Drew? Would you like to explain?"

Did he _breathe_? The guy was about to split with excitement.

Drew marched to the front of the classroom and let those arms dangle at his sides. "Algebra comes in handy in many areas of our lives, especially when it comes to shopping and buying things. If you know how much cereal is in a box, and you know the cost of the box, you can figure out whether or not you're getting a good deal by figuring how much you're paying per ounce. Geometry helps you figure out the most efficient ways of storing your things in a messy room. You can use charts and graphs to calculate the expenses of your doomsd - of your lemonade stand - and find the maximum profit."

 _Wow. Dad would love this kid._

"There are even more uses for quadratic and cubic equations, which we won't get to until high school," Drew said. He gazed at the class in a way that reminded Kim of those old World War II posters of Uncle Sam in her history book before turning back to the board. "For example, an equation to measure electrical resistance is as follows -"

Standing up there in front of the board, writing equations as though he'd learned them in kindergarten, Drew looked so accomplished, it was hard to imagine anyone picking on him. Until he was done and looked up and sniffed and shoved those big glasses up his tiny nose.

Ms. Dayrumple had an entire Kleenex pulled across her mouth by now.

Kim intently studied her manicured-by-Mom fingernails so that she could pretend to miss the group eye-roll Bonnie was organizing. It was one cheerleader huddle she suddenly didn't mind not being a part of.

* * *

The second the last bell rang - the very _second_ \- Drew zipped for the restroom and locked himself in a stall. The only thing he could be thankful for - besides that the boys' bathroom was in the same place as he remembered it - was that middle-school boys didn't migrate to the bathrooms in posses the way the girls did.

 _Posse_. Why he'd have to think _that_ word? Three young faces and their adult counterparts flashed in and out of Drew's mind like a strobe light, and it made him want to slam his forehead into the wall. The memory was like a vampire bat: it cut him with its fangs and then lapped up what dribbled out.

No, that was ridiculous, Drew told himself. Memories weren't capable of such ghastly things. They were nothing more than the left hemisphere of your brain playing on a crude projector, with film that could have been loaded backward or become hopelessly tangled or any number of other things.

Drew pressed two clammy hands to the back of his neck as the flames licked at his heart - what seventh-grader had heartburn, anyway? He'd blown it. _Majorly_ blown it. If he'd "blown it out of the water," as Drew had heard the chatty cheerleaders gush about their auditions, that would have, somehow, been a good thing. But this was bad, it was so very bad, that he had to have "blown it" somewhere else. Straight down into the Land of Failure, Drew supposed.

Kim Possible had been scant millimeters away from a lifetime of misery. As soon as the "stupid" left his mouth, she'd stared at him without a hint of offendment in those plucky green eyes Dr. Drakken had always despised, knowing before he did that he would not turn on her.

And he hadn't.

Those boys in gym class were right: he was nothing more than a wuss. An ingenious wuss with many brilliant ideas, but a wuss nonetheless.

From his pocket, Drew's phone vibrated as if too were trying to shake some sense into him. He found it with a bleak grip and withdrew it. He knew it would be Shego sniping at him, and for once he didn't care. How could she possibly scold him any worse than the accusations in his own head?

She was Shego, that was how. Drew took one look at the phone's screen and the burn in his chest scalded.

 **Dr. D, school is OVER. What. The. Heck. Look, whatever you're doing, it's NOT working. I'm gonna step in and take care of this myself.**

A chill-thrill spilled over Drew. Although there was no stutter, his Autocorrect got quite a workout turning **Wath do yuo mena?** into **What do you mean?**

 **Look, Kimmie has extracurricular activities, I'm guessing?** Shego sent back.

 **Right.** The letters seemingly tapped themselves out, the way they did on one of the wee-hours-of-the-morning horror films he'd caught before.

 **So I'm coming to finish her off. Shego-style.**

 _Malfunction. Malfunction!_ The speckled finish of the stall wall grew larger as Drew tipped against it to prevent himself from collapsing.

 **Shego, wait, please -** he started to type, and his fingers then froze. Shego had spoken with finality that was unmistakable, even over text. Nothing could stop her now.

It was a thought that drove Drew's fists to the wall. _She's going to come in - this was my chance - and now she's going to steal my glory!_

 _What glory?_ scoffed an inner voice that sounded very much like Shego.

 _Doggone you;_ my _glory!_ said his adult-voice, his Drakken-voice. His left hemisphere obliged him this time by spinning out the silent reel of his aspirations for today: Kim Possible's spirit shriveling and shrinking from sight, her face crumpled as it fell victim to tears. It was a far crueler and more fitting fate than any death trap he could devise.

And, all right, so the fact that it would be accomplished without bloodshed had rather appealed to him, too.

(So he didn't love the sight of blood. So sue him!)

Drew opened the door of the stall, staggered forward, accidentally flipped on a faucet, and stumbled into the adjacent sink. Or was it the same sink, since they shared a counter and all?

Who even CARED?

His reflection was almost painful to look at as he turned the water back off. Definitely not that of a junkyard dog. More like a Pound Puppy.

His eyes were watery, swimming in red, onion-cutter's eyes. His - err - blemishes raged as though infected. The discolored skin was an even sicklier hue of pale than usual.

Not once since he'd last seen that exact image in the glass had Drew experienced such a tsunami of self-disgust.

With that in his gut, venturing out of the bathroom wouldn't have been a good idea were his sidekick not about to destroy his biggest nemesis. Then again, Drew reasoned, under different circumstances he wouldn't be feeling so nauseous in the first place, and Kim Possible wasn't really all that big, physically -

 _Ladies and gentlemen, ADHD at work_ , he could almost hear Shego say.

That dumb ol' Juvinator. It _had_ regressed him mentally! That was why he was too lonely to be vicious. Why his singular goal had been reduced to a parenthetical digression. Why even now he'd just thought "dumb ol'" instead of "blasted."

To Drew's horror, the blood vessels in his eyes began to swell with whatever was happening in his heart. So it was not a digestive issue at all, but a circulatory one, and because of it he was now either about to cry or go into cardiac arrest.

Saying he'd prefer cardiac arrest would have been every bit as dramatic and brave and stiff-upper-lipped as Drew hoped to be, but - really - who would rather die than cry?

Well, whichever he was going to do, he couldn't do it _here_ , not right next to a urinal. What if one of those jocks walked in and discovered him? He'd be up the flagpole before a lamb could shake its tail - or whatever the colloquial was.

Besides, if he didn't hurry, Kim Possible would be finished off without his ever being even a part of it. And as torn as Drew's emotions were, that was the most devastating possibility they could dredge up.

Drew groped with limited visibility for the door. It slapped open under his palms and allowed him to leave.

He was just beginning to assess the situation when something smacked him on the backside. Drew gasped and prepared to be wedgied to death.

It was, however, only the door nailing him on its way back to its frame. Drew seared it with a glare and stumbled forward. He breathed hard through his nostrils, but his pulse wasn't interested in slowing.

Surely even Shego would agree he deserved a role in his own arch-foe's demise!

 _Okay. Okay. Okay. It'll be okay._ Drew braced himself against a wall once more and ground his teeth. _I'll go find Shego - no - go find Kim Possible before Shego does._

 _And let her catch you blubbering?_ said the Shego-voice. _Right. Good luck with that._

Drew took three more running steps forward and barreled straight into the water fountain - seriously, even the inanimate objects seemed to be conspiring against him. He hid himself under it - which was depressingly easy to do - just for the sake of appeasing the twelve-year-old inside him.

All right, so he would get a handle on himself first. Then he would find Kim Possible and see to it that he wasn't the only member of the "posse" who would cry today.

A tear bounced off one of Drew's clenched fists.

* * *

"We'll see you at cheer practice, right?"

There wasn't a hint of ditch-us-and-we'll-ditch-you in Liz's voice, so the smile that sprang to Kim's face didn't feel like she'd just run it off a copy machine. Bonnie hovered in the background, busy glowering at the not-that-cool jumper Tara had had the _nerve_ to "let" her mom ship her off to school in.

"Of course I'll be there," Kim said, jabbing a playful hand at Liz's arm. She thought about adding, _What would you guys do without me?_ \- as a joke - but that could backfire in more ways than Dad's first car. She replaced it with, "Cheerleading is my life."

Okay, so that wasn't _completely_ true.

"I just need to give Ron the sched, and I'll be right there," Kim said.

Liz's eyes shifted, like she was considering whether or not to make a sourball-face at the mention of Ron. When she shook her head, Kim had the same giant _Phew!_ she got whenever Dad decided NOT to ground her. "All right. Just don't be late, 'kay?"

"Wouldn't miss it!" Kim called over her shoulder as she walked away.

That _was_ the truth. Bonnie had gold hoops almost the size of training wheels dangling from her lobes today, and Kim couldn't wait to see perfect little Bonnie get a well-deserved tail-chewing in front of the _entire_ squad.

 _Karma, anyone?_

Kim kept the smile as she slipped through what Dad on the first day of sixth grade had called a "teaming mass of humanity." That'd also been right about when Kim had discovered some advantages to her a-little-smaller-than-average size. Now she slipped easily between two basketball players and did a full swivel around that one girl who always wore a too-big blue jacket - even on seventy-five-degree days like this one - and headed for the school library as soon as the bell rang every day. She was about to make a wide turn around the corner toward Ron's last-period Social Studies room when a nearby door opened and another wave of kids streamed out in one big surge of pent-up energy.

One eighth-grader who was big enough to have been held back a year or two threw his sweaty chest against Kim's arm - _ewww_ \- and slammed her up against the door to the girls' bathroom. She felt the handle digging into her unprotected belly button.

"Hello!" Kim jerked her head around to yell over the fray. "Rude much?"

And that was when she heard the crying.

Kim did an immediate once-over of the hall to see if anyone else was hearing it. She _severely_ hoped not. Tears in middle school were basically a big honkin' neon sign that flashed, "Pick on me! Pick on me!"

None of the hall's grins lit up and turned nasty, and the sniffles were so close that Kim decided she was probably the only one who caught them as she peeled herself off the girls' door and shot a glance at the boys'. They were two of the three little niches that took up part of one wall, parked farther back with the water fountain between them.

And, sure enough, there was a boy-kid in the shadows under the fountain, folded into such a tight knot that all you could really see of him were his blue-jeaned knees and the one arm he'd flung across them. Its awkward length could have belonged to any boy in the school, but once Kim was close enough to see the baby-blue color - _that_ sure narrowed it down.

Yeah, maybe she'd have to miss Bonnie's chewing-out after all.

Kim wedged herself in front of the water fountain until most of the "teaming mass" had trickled away and then squatted down beside the kid. "Drew? Are you okay?" _Dumb question._ "What's wrong?"

A low foghorn-moan came out of him. It sounded like the only thing that was holding in the full-out sobs wobbling at its edges.

"Did one of those jerks beat you up?" Kim said.

"No. Not since this morning."

"Okay - did some girl say something evil to you?" Kim had her fingers crossed that that _wasn't_ it. Boys were WAY easier to keep in line than girls.

Something about that sentence seemed to scare Drew. His head-shake was frantic this time and accompanied by a computer-on-the-fritz type of hiccup. "No, it isn't any of them. It's you."

"Me!?" Kim said. "What did _I_ do? I thought I was really nice to you today!"

"That's exactly the problem," Drew said, swiping at his cheeks. "You've been entirely too nice. You and Stoppable both."

He was shaking so bad - and so _not_ making sense - that fear gripped at Kim. The Red Cross classes hadn't gotten to treating hysteria yet. Kim had only seen Mom talk a few soon-to-be-patients down from whatever craziness had landed them in her operating room in the first place, and she tried to channel her mom's softness when she said, "What do you mean?"

"First you save me from those eighth-graders!" Drew wailed. "Then you invite me to have lunch, then Stoppable watches my back in gym, and then you help me in language arts! You tell me I have dyslexia, and I didn't even know that was a thing and - and - and - " He paused for a gasp, and Kim noticed that the halls were pretty much quiet and empty by now except for a set of sharp, authoritative steps that had to belong to a teacher.

She jumped at the chance to fill the rest of it. "Seriously - Drew - why is that a problem?" Kim said, inching closer and resting her fingertips on Drew's wrist. It felt as if he cringed straight down to his bones.

"Because!" Drew let out the loudest choke-cry so far and plunged his gaze to his denim lap. "I haven't been entirely honest with you, Kim Possible. And the truth of the matter is - I was sent here to hurt you."

Kim waited for the freak-out to climb up her backbone and grab her by the neck. Instead, she had the demented urge to laugh. "What are you _talking_ about? Sent here by _who_?"

Drew lifted his face and searched Kim's with eyes that were truly mournful. "Myself."

The word went through Kim like a snake bite, and it killed the laughter in two seconds. She plastered both hands over her mouth more from sheer shock than the terror that hardly flickered on her radar screen anymore. If only she could wrap her brain halfway around it - she could cook up a plan, no sweat.

But this was a total blank. Give her villains with lasers any day.

"Oh, I'm sorry. Am I interrupting something?" someone said above them.

Kim had never heard any voice out-cut Bonnie's, but this one could've pinned you to the wall like one of those ninja stars she'd seen on TV. It perfectly matched the cold, almost-white beauty that Kim saw when she lifted her head and stared at the woman in front of her.

She was definitely an adult - with, like, an actual figure and skin that had recovered from its last pimple years ago - but she barely looked old enough to be out of college. Definitely not someone's mom. And not a teacher, either, not in that green-and-black-patterned - what had Mom called the hideous thing packed away in her closet from two decades back - a jumpsuit? It should have come across as stupid and outdated as it was, but instead it elegantly draped her body and left her looking like she'd just come gliding off a runway wearing nothing but designer brands.

And a dead expression that raised goose bumps right down to Kim's ankles.

The woman gave Kim a glance so empty that it had to be hiding something before boring a pointy-eyed glare into Drew. "You do know she's _waaay_ too young for you, right, Doc?" she said.

Kim felt her forehead pucker. _What the heck was that about?_ This lady seemed like the type who had too much class to pick on a kid with glasses.

Drew looked as if he were on his way to the chopping block they'd read about in history class today. He started to stand up, stumbled over his own legs, and sprawled across the tennie-streaked linoleum. "Yes," he said, every letter more high-pitched than the one before it. "Hi, Shego."

No matter how unflattering the whole lip-hanging-to-the-chest thing was, Kim couldn't pull hers back in. He KNEW her?

Shego - seriously, who named their kid that? - pulled something out from behind her back that could've been a baby toy if it weren't obviously metal-hard and full of circuits. "Come here, shrimp," she said. "And take care of _that_." She waved a hand up and down Drew's entire skinny frame.

Drew took a few obedient steps forward, but Kim was right behind him. "Look - whoever you are, leave him alone!" she said.

It only halted Drew, and just for a heartbeat. Cheeks squeezing as if he were in bee-sting pain, he skittered the rest of the way to Shego. She tipped the baby-toy thing into his hands, and with a sigh bigger than he was, Drew squished down on the stump that stuck out from the rings.

There was a burnt-yellow explosion of light, like some obnoxious kid had burst open a mustard packet. When it cleared, Drew was gone.

In his place was a blue man.

He wasn't an especially big man, but he was a man all the same - a head-and-a-half taller than her, with a sturdier look to his gangliness. A stark black scar ripped down one sharp cheekbone. His eyebrows had merged and formed a threatening V over his eyes.

But his eyes didn't have the same hard, cold glitter to them that the woman's did. Oh, sure, they were trying, but something unsure - maybe even scared - rested in them.

Those were still Drew's eyes.

It was the only thing that kept Kim from flying at him with fists and shouts of "You liar!"

Instead, she got a handle on the jaw-drop and squinted at the guy. "Okay, _who_ are you?" she said.

"I am Dr. Drakken!" the man said. His words didn't squeak anymore. They rumbled their way from his throat as if they were climbing the sides of a canyon.

 _Yeah, might miss cheer practice over this._

It gave Kim enough exasperation mojo to roll her eyes and say, "And lemme guess - Drew Lipsky was your alias."

A blink in response. "No. Drew Lipsky is my given name." The man's eyes winced, as if he wished he hadn't said that.

Kim could feel the ball bouncing back toward her court, and she raced to intercept it. "What do you want with me, then, Drakken? I've never even MET you."

"Ohhh, you may never have met me," Dr. Drakken said. "But I've met _you_ many times before."

Yikes.

"Oh, I get it," Kim managed to say. "You're psycho." In spite of the fear that was beading on her forehead, _her_ words didn't squeak. No way was she letting these two know that she'd chop off her own hair to have shy little Drew back.

"Or I'm from the future!" Drakken said. The snobbery that had been almost-cute on Drew coated his face like a layer of grime. "You see, Kim Possible, years from now, I am the planet's foremost mad scientist, poised on the brink of world domination! And _you_ are the single biggest thorn in my side!" He flung one endlessly-long arm toward Kim with all the coordination of his twelve-year-old self.

She threw that self the only lifeline she could find - "Is this about your dad?"

Kim watched as Drakken hardened into a disheveled statue. "No!" he said. Droplets of spittle broke loose and Kim backed up, because if one of them made contact with her, she knew she'd throw up. "This is about the world that rightfully should be mine - isn't!"

"Grammar, Doc - " Shego said with what sounded like complete boredom.

"Hush, Shego! It's about the humiliation you have handed me, the disrespect you've shown me, the fool you've made of me! It's about all the times you sent me to prison!"

It was that last word that froze Kim's heart to the walls of her chest. So far, she'd only been involved in sneaking into villains' lairs and back out with stolen tech without them ever knowing she was there. She'd never known anyone who'd actually been to prison, let alone because of _her_.

 _So I grow up to be a hero after all._ It was more of a rush than being allowed to stay in the pool during Adult Swim this summer.

Kim liked to think of herself as a nice person, but there was a _not-MY-fault-you-turned-out-a-loser_ ready to rocket right out of her. Before it could, though, Drakken swallowed her with a look so dark neither of them could escape from it.

"And that is why" - he parted his lips in a snarl, and Kim blankly registered that the braces had worked miracles - "I am going to rid the world of you before you ever get the chance to defeat me even once!"

It took about two seconds for Kim to put together what he was saying. That was one second longer than it took for Shego to slip over and curl sharp-tipped iron fingers around Kim's wrist. Kim instinctively shot up a knee to jostle Shego in the stomach with it, but Shego easily blocked her with the opposite forearm. Silent, mean laughter twitched at her mouth.

Kim could feel her pride scraping down as her scream of, "Somebody - HELP!" went up. Still, if it worked -

It _did_ work, just not in the way Kim had expected. Shego had to let go of Kim's arm to grab for her mouth, and as soon as she did, Kim slammed one arm into each of Shego's sides with all her eighty-two-pound strength. The curves Kim had seen earlier were all wiry muscle and only took a blink of time to recover.

But a blink was long enough. Kim wrenched herself free and took off down the hallway, leaving the bathrooms and the crazy must-have-been-supervillains in her dust.

There was a low-pitched zing from overhead. A snot-green trail of _some_ thing blasted the floor in front of Kim, leaving a scorch mark that majorly outdid the sneaker-treads. Its hiss mixed with the blade of a voice that snapped, "Class isn't dismissed yet, Kimmy."

Kim didn't let herself hesitate. Before her legs could go limp, she had already backflipped herself over the green goop, breath held as the heat from it brushed her fingertips, and touched down on the other side, already jogging again before her feet had fully touched the ground. She pushed and pumped until knitting needles pierced at her ribs, a feeling she barely remembered that just fired her up more.

A backward glance showed Shego was keeping up behind her - just about running on the walls, from what Kim could tell. The woman oozed raw talent as much as her hands oozed that gross-me-OUT! stuff.

The hall's next bend was visible up ahead, and Kim powered herself toward it. She'd stick with the plan - she'd find Ron bumming around his last class, and together the two of them could -

But she hadn't even made any decent progress on a plan when Shego vaulted in front of her with a backflip that made Kim's look like something from toddler tumbling classes. She had her elbows cocked and aimed like guns, twin green circles enveloping her hands. "Going somewhere, princess?" she sneered.

Who _was_ this girl?

 _Oh, well. I've been wanting to try this move for a while, anyway._

Kim barreled toward Shego and jumped in the instant before she'd have hit her. Using Shego's shoulders and shivering at the power she could feel hidden inside them, Kim executed the launch that always got her to the top of the cheerleader pyramid in nothing flat. She couldn't help grinning as she braced her ankles to take the weight, exactly the way she'd learned, so she could keep right on running.

She never got the chance. Between Kim's landing and her next step, Shego had slipped in front of her. She swung one leg out like a construction crane, sweeping both of Kim's out from under her.

Black spots quivered in front of Kim, and she was still on the ground when another body dropped all neat-and-tidy on top of her.

In the dim light of the bulb flickering for its life above them, Shego's pointy face was starting to look closer and closer to pop-bottle-green. She wrenched both of Kim's arms behind her back with the ease of somebody who'd done this before and laid her feet over Kim's toes so there couldn't be any kicking.

 _Sheesh_ \- today was prep for School Spirit Week, wasn't it? The cheer squad was going to be _so_ tweaked when Kim finally did show up. All but Bonnie, who'd just stand around feeling vindicated - to use a vocab word - that Kim was going to get in more trouble for her insane lateness than Bonnie had for her stupid earrings.

Kim fought back with her fingernails, insteps, thighs, and every other piece of herself she was still in command of. But Shego was bigger and stronger, with years of practice and discipline and something else that kept her chest from desperate-heaving and took the place of sweat as she jerked Kim's back into ruler-straightness.

Pure hatred.

And hers didn't have the same scab-freshly-ripped-off vibe as Drakken's did. Shego's hate was cool and smooth and stopped just short of amused. It was as if this was what she did for _fun_.

Clumsy footsteps approached, and Kim kept her eyes glued to Drakken to search him for any hints of Drew. She didn't find any - not with him hiding behind some weird machine that looked like he'd swiped it from one of Ron's bad-graphics video games. The thing had an extension that jutted out the front, shower-nozzle-style, and sparkled with silver mini-wires. Buttons and knobs gave way to a back end that was one long cord, plugged into the top and then curving down to an identical plug at the bottom. Drakken's fingers were currently tangled in it.

Kim had no idea where he'd been storing _that_ up until now, and she didn't especially care. She recognized a weapon when she saw one.

 _I HAD to wish for villains with lasers._

That thought screamed in Kim's mind - over the throbbing backbeat of, _I could be in_ real _trouble_.

Mom's and Dad's faces sped into the twins' and Ron's like a dizzying music video. Kim thought she might have even seen Rufus in there.

Kim ground her heel back onto Shego's foot. Shego only tightened her hold, something sharper than just fingernails nicking Kim right through her sleeves, but she couldn't give up. She wasn't used to losing. She didn't know _how_ to lose.

It had been a long time since tears had clouded Kim's vision, but she was sure having some trouble seeing now. Still, she forced the sweat on her forehead into ice. She'd follow the Possible tradition and be brave. She'd fight, but she wouldn't cry. Wouldn't beg.

Kim bit one of Shego's fingers. She pulled back with the kind of hiss people used when they were trying not to cuss. It freed her lips for a second.

No, she wouldn't beg - but she _would_ try asking.

"Drew?" Kim said. "Drew, are you in there?"

A muscle jumped in the man's round jaw.

"Look, I didn't know Drew Lipsky very well," Kim said.

Drakken looked down at the floor. Kim was sure it was to hide something she wasn't supposed to see, something too strong for him to White*Out.

She pounced on the pencil-thin hope and kept going. "But I liked him. He was a sweet kid." Kim's voice warbled, and she cleared it back into place. "I know he wouldn't want to grow up to be the type of person who'd kill a twelve-year-old girl."

That was when Drakken lifted his gaze to meet Kim's. The White*Out had worked this time. His face was a void.

"Drew Lipsky never got anything he wanted," he said.

Shego's hand clamped back down over Kim's mouth as Drakken lifted the laser again. Noticing that the thumb that reached for the trigger was trembling didn't do a whole lot to comfort Kim. Drew was in there, all right, but somewhere between twelve and - what, twenty-eight? - he'd gone crazy-desperate enough to do anything.

ANYthing.

"Say goodbye, Kim Possible," Drakken said, with an edge as stiff as a drenched-and-dried swimsuit. The stomach Kim was slammed up against shook, laughing without a sound again.

Kim closed her eyes. _We love you, Kimmy_ , she heard Mom say.

 _Whatever happens, it'll be just fine_ , Dad added.

 _Please be right._

There was a loud crackle of power - and then an explosion of grunts that ricocheted off the walls and back again.

Kim opened her eyes and glanced down at herself. She didn't know much about the afterlife, but she decided that the mosquito bite itching on her left shin was a pretty good sign she was still alive.

That and Shego starting a mountain lion routine under her breath. Kim followed the poisonous eyes as they made a beeline straight back to her wack boyfriend-or-whatever-he-was-to-her.

Drakken had never touched the trigger. A half-centimeter below it, the power cord had been yanked out of its sockets and was currently dangling like a dead snake. The rest of the thing shot sparks to rival Shego's.

 _Maybe I'll make the last half of cheerleading practice._

Drakken finally collected enough syllables to snarl, "Dagnabbit all!" Kim could only marvel at how much he sounded like Elmer Fudd and wonder how she was even getting air at this point.

"Dr. D-eee!" Shego flounced back her hair without lifting so much as a finger from Kim's arm. "Oh, for the love of - I'll just do it myself, then!"

Shego broke out the green glow again. It surrounded a fist that pulled itself expertly back and had no intention of missing.

A second, weirdly-small hand closed around Shego's wrist. "No, Shego, wait!" Drakken yelped - complete with the familiar crack between words, which Kim guessed could be chalked up to having just fast-forwarded himself back through puberty. "We can't ki - destroy her! Not here, I mean. Not now!"

It didn't put the glow, whatever it was, away. Shego just flipped it around toward Drakken, and for a second Kim actually expected her to rake it down _his_ face. "You are _not_ wussing out on me now!" Shego said.

"Certainly not." Drakken sniffed, going from Elmer Fudd to King George III. "But I've done a few more calculations - in my head, at that - and I've determined this entire scheme has been faulty from the start."

"There's a shocker for ya," Shego said. Her sarcasm was thicker than the malts down at Cow-N-Chow.

It was Drakken's turn to close his eyes, as if it took all his strength to ignore that. "If we eliminate Kim Possible at this point in time, unforeseen consequences could ripple up the entire time stream!" he said.

"Such as?" Shego's smirk stayed in place, though Kim could feel her hesitating.

"Such as - remember that time she saved my life?"

Shego's stomach twitched Kim back and forth again. "Sure I do. You woulda been blueberry toast if she hadn't - "

" _Precisely_ my point!" Drakken interrupted a little too fast. "If we destroy her here and now, I might wake up one day in the future and find myself dead, and that would make me very cross!"

 _Uh, do you think?_

Shego nodded as if she were in pain. "Meaning?"

"Meaning - there's only one thing for us to do, Shego." Drakken hitched at the belt his close-together hips were barely keeping up. "We must return to the current present" - _current present?_ \- "and find a way to crush her _there_."

Shego gave another of those substitute-for-swearing hisses. "I shoulda known this was too easy," she said, prying her fingers loose from Kim's arm. The tiny cuts all but hummed in relief. Shego gave Drakken a look that could've killed a cockroach - and then turned and delivered an identical one that dried up Kim's grin before it could even take shape. She suddenly felt stupid and shallow for _ever_ having considered _Bonnie_ "evil."

Without a word, Shego sailed down the hallway, footsteps clacking out, _I don't have TIME for this_. A shadow as big as the school itself seemed to follow her.

It was Drakken who spun toward her as he backed away, his eyes circling like a plane that couldn't find the landing strip. Kim wondered why _that_ came to mind instead of a vulture until he opened up and talked again.

"Until we meet again, Kim Possible!" Drakken roared. "Or - or for the first time. . . the next first time? Oh, whatever. Just - be afraid!"

She was, Kim thought. But probably not as afraid as he wanted her to be as she watched him scurry after Shego, his kid-hands drawn together at his chest.

 _Maybe I should have left him for those eighth-graders to pick over after all._

It was an empty thought with only numb fingertips and slices in her arms for backup. If there were any righteous anger to feel, it wasn't gonna show up 'till a _lot_ later.

Kim didn't know how long she stared after the just-as-empty hallway, aching for a story she'd never know and a friend who was apparently never meant to be hers and a trust that hadn't seemed naive this morning. All she could put together was that the janitor hadn't made his final lights-out rounds by the time sneakers banged around the corner toward her.

"KP!" Someone's voice cracked and sent most of the ache away.

"Over here!" Kim called back.

Ron skidded to a stop beside her and cocked his head. "Seriously, Kim, where the heck have you been? Tara sent me to find you 'cuz you never showed up for practice, and you swore you'd be there and everyone was really worried - well, except Bonnie - she was just tweaked because -"

Kim didn't catch the rest. Now that the threat had cleared out and she was, you know, still alive, she felt like a pulsing bag of feathers. Ron, with his absolutely-zero muscle mass and his floppy Muppet-feet, didn't look a whole lot stronger - he never did - but Kim threw her arms around him and held on anyway.

 _Thank goodness it's you._

Kim didn't know she'd said it out loud until Ron's whisper - "Why?" - tickled her ear.

"Because you're the only one who'd believe what just happened to me," Kim said.

"Geez," Ron said, resting a clumsy hand on her back. "You look like you just saw a ghost." He whipped around to study the hall, face mission-wary. "You didn't, did you? Rip Snorter was right - the sixth-grade wing really _is_ haunted by the vengeful spirit of an old student, isn't it?"

"Ron - "

"They say he got stuffed in a locker and suffocated before they could get him out -"

"Ron!" Kim held him out at arms' length to pin him with The Look. "It wasn't a ghost. At least, not one from the past. More like. . . a ghost from the future."

"'Kay," Ron replied with a blink. "That, uh, doesn't make major amounts of sense. Come on, tell me _totes_!"

He deepened the last sentence in a pretty-good imitation of the guidance counselor - except Mr. Bleakman never would have said _totally_ , much less _totes_. Kim did grin this time, though it threatened to shake right off any second. She squeezed Ron's hand in a way she hadn't done since elementary ended - without even checking to make sure no one saw her.

And if Bonnie didn't like it, she could go take a freezing-cold shower.

* * *

Dr. Drakken would have described himself as many things but never - despite Shego's assertions to the contrary - a failure.

Now, with the burn in his chest burning and the doubts outshouting the BeeGees record he had playing, it seemed rather more accurate.

The only good thing was that they'd made a clean escape from Middleton Middle. And even at that, Drakken had gotten an earful of Shego's opinion on the way home. As much as he tried to shut his auditory canals to it, it was like a jackhammer in the eardrum: it couldn't be tuned out.

As soon as they'd arrived back at the lair, Drakken had time-traveled them back to the present-day; he took some comfort in the fact that he had remembered to do that before destroying reality as he knew it. Not enough comfort, though, to keep him from storming into his lab, slamming and locking the door, and reaching for some tunes of his own. He didn't want Shego's company, considering he didn't have much to say in his own defense.

Kim Possible had accomplished exactly the sort of feat her name suggested - she'd beaten him without throwing a single punch. Drakken figured that, all things considered, he deserved to be alone with the demons of the past he'd dredged up.

Except there _were_ no "demons." Just a painful-looking adolescent boy with enough angst for any five other preteens.

Drakken heard himself groan as though from far away. Shego would have told him to "stop feeling sorry for yourself, Dr. D" - and yet Drew was a creature Drakken had kept so far removed from him that Drakken could hardly think of Drew _as_ himself. Where he came from was supposed to be swaddled away in his "Tragic Backstory" file, not out spraying graffiti over his past schemes. Present schemes! Future schemes? His brilliant schemes - whenever they were - for world domination.

Not demanding something else altogether.

Still, the plan should have worked, if Shego hadn't come nosing her way in, insisting upon an actual death. Slaying Kim Possible emotionally, not physically, would have created far smaller ripples in the time stream. Manageable ones. No need to whip out The Butterfly Effect and The Grandfather Paradox to double-check the survival of his someday-subjects.

Of course, if Kim Possible had never had the courage to become a hero, who would have saved him six months ago from that rebellious nitroglycerin about to level his entire lair?

Drakken picked up a pencil from his desk. It slid counter-clockwise in his grip and pricked through his glove in a perfect graphite puncture. Drakken's temper, already bloated to the breaking point, burst; he yelled, "YAAAGGNN!" and hurled the pencil at the wall. It hit with a miniscule noise as Drakken stood there staring at it, panting worse than Commodore Puddles on a midsummer's day.

 _And who could blame me, really?_ he thought. _Up until now, I've never experienced a locker room scene_ and _the demise of a foolproof scheme in the same day._

The plan really had been foolproof. It simply wasn't _Drew_ proof. The two were not synonymous.

 _Naturally_ , Drakken realized, _because Drew is no fool._ It was a weak victory, but at this point it felt every bit as solid as a sweeping checkmate.

Seriously, though - he had failed at what had to be among The World's Easiest Tasks To Accomplish: breaking a metal-mouthed pipsqueak. Kim Possible's spirit had proven more indomitable than that. His own - err, that was to say, Drew's - had been less so.

(Was "less indomitable" the same thing as "more domitable"?)

Drakken groped for even a strand of something positive.

Well, there was the fact that he would undoubtedly go down on Kim Possible's permanent record as a genuine threat. She'd forever see him as the man who pointed a trigger straight between her eyes.

But even that thought was sore to the touch. Drakken had been so close to ridding the world of his nemesis, mere seconds away - and she'd been struggling there, so little, eyes squashed shut, and his subconscious had had second thoughts and his hands had slipped and then every villain-instinct he had came at him in a rush of _Do it now! Pull it!_

No, no, Kim Possible would never know if he had terminated the mission on purpose. How could she? Drakken _himself_ didn't even know.

Drakken slammed a fist down on the surface of his desk. The Juvinator, looking as innocuous as. . . well, a baby's ring toy, jittered and tipped against his portable time machine. _It_ sat there and looked obnoxiously like a toaster, though it reminded Drakken more of a chicken pox scab, forever shaming you with the knowledge that you scratched when your mother clearly forbade you to. He took a moment to pore over it, taking in its toaster-dials and the slits where the date he wanted would spring up like Pop-Tarts.

All right, so that analogy didn't quite work - since the dates wouldn't come popping partway out of the slots, where they could be fully extracted with precision and wooden tongs. Still, there were so many as-yet-unexplored uses for it. Drakken could warp himself back to the Stone Age, convince the cavemen he was a god, and start a cult that would be passed down the generations. He could travel into a future where he was already ruler and then work backward, though that smacked a little of paradox. . .

 _Wait - I'm missing something. What am I missing?_

Of course. The Reset button. The one that would wipe the minds of everyone involved, including Drakken himself.

Drakken didn't reach for the button right away. There were, after all, a few advantages toward letting the event stand. Kim Possible would recognize him at their "first" meeting two years ago, for one thing, which would be flattering to that year's unaware Drakken, although by the time it traveled its way up the time stream to now, it would be nothing more than a memory.

But that also meant Drakken would have shown her vulnerability and weakness right from the start, _before_ the start - in the pre-game cutscene. Their classic supervillain-and-his-nemesis relationship was in enough peril when he _wasn't_ shorter than her.

Did he want to remember being Drew Lipsky again?

Was that a trick question? He could hardly bear to look back on his _first_ past.

There was a sudden drop to his insides, as if Drakken had stepped onto a down escalator without warning, as an even more horrible prospect fell into place. Every time _he_ looked at Kim Possible now, he would see her willingly sitting with him at lunch, her crouched beside him in Language Arts, telling him that his brain had a known compatibility issue with spelling and it wasn't his fault -

And he'd never, in good conscience, be able to kill her. If there was one thing Drakken had learned in his life as a mad scientist - well, alongside such lessons as _make sure your robots aren't smart enough to rebel_ and _never store piranha in the coffeepot_ \- it was that it was far easier to wipe a mind than a conscience, and if he didn't wipe one of them soon, he would never be able to rule the world.

Trade a day's pleasure for a lifetime of glory.

Should have been an easy decision. So why did something ache right square in his center? Could have been from where that eighth-grade doofus had knuckled him earlier, Drakken supposed.

He wondered - briefly, vacantly - if he would wonder about the inevitable bruise after he Reset. Most likely not, Drakken decided. Most likely he'd chalk it up to having slammed into one of the lair's ominous rectangular structures that he loved so much.

The first few dramatic notes of "Stayin' Alive" invigorated him, spiking his pulse, and with the face of a lonely twelve-year-old swimming in his brain, Drakken leaned forward and pushed the button. The time machine hummed and emitted a wide, white beam of light that cleansed the world.

 _Mind bleach works faster than Clorox_ , was all Drakken could think in the instant before it hit him. _Maybe I could even get it to take out that toothpaste jingle I can't get out of my -_

WHOOSH.

Dr. Drakken opened his eyes and blinked against the rude stickiness of his contact lenses. He felt strangely tired, re-awakening, as though he'd taken a nap - a luxury he rarely permitted himself. Who had time for sleep when one was poised on the brink of world domination?

Well, maybe not poised on the _exact_ brink. But he'd certainly driven past the "CAUTION - CLIFF AHEAD" sign, laughing all the way.

Drakken cracked his knuckles, shook his oddly-fogged head, and headed for his computer. Next stop: the Unofficial Obscure Bioweapons Forum.


	26. New Life

**~Fluffiness for everyone! :D**

 **I finally did decide on a future-hubby for Shego. It's a risk, but I'm going with it. .  
**

 **Baby's namesake probably isn't that hard to guess - but I'll give you a virtual cookie anyway. ;)~**

Dr. Drakken executes his four-thousand-nine-hundred-and-eighty-eighth turn on the hospital-issue carpet and paces with the expertise of a veteran mad scientist. If Shego were here, she'd say, _Dr. D, you're wearing a path._

Of course, if Shego _were_ here - not cloistered away behind a very scary set of glass double doors, lying in a bed somewhere and ejecting a miniature person from her body - there would have been no reason to tread this carpet five thousand times.

Drakken knows the gist of what giving birth entails. Still, he doesn't grasp the _entirety_ of what's going on in that room, nor does he want to; his curiosity is not as strong as his panic. He has heard that childbirth is the greatest pain the human body can go through, right up there with a broken femur, certainly far above the cramped discs in his back that Drakken thought hurt more than anything else in the world could, so he can't begin to imagine what she must be going through.

And for all his yelling at Shego over the years, his threats to fire her, and even the one instance of mind control - he was going through a phase - Drakken has never wanted her to be in that kind of agony.

Hubby Barkin called him earlier this afternoon with the news that Shego's contractions had started, but they were still ten minutes apart and there was no need to leave for the hospital just yet.

Did they not comprehend what a short span of time "ten minutes" was? Only as long as two of the _Science Time With Dr. Drakken_ podcasts Global Justice has stared airing on Middleton Public Radio! Shego would be having a baby-pain between podcasts, and that sounded quite serious to Drakken.

From that moment on, Drakken's cell phone never strayed from his person. Once Barkin finally called again - in a few vibrations that nearly went unnoticed because they were indistinguishable from Drakken's own tremors - it was with the news that the contractions were now a scant three minutes apart, and they were _finally_ headed to the hospital. Drakken immediately jumped in the hovercraft and piloted it there as best he could.

And waited.

And waited.

Now he continues to wait, his fingernails mere nubbins behind raw, exposed skin. He's been pacing back and forth, forth and back, everything except upside-down and sideways for the past five hours. Drakken's not sure, even as his knees continue to bend and press, that he'll be able to hang on to the ability to keep moving for another five. He's sprung up every time he hears a baby cry - which is obviously frequent in the delivery ward - but it's never been the one he's awaiting.

Every now and then Shego will holler, a sound like glass melting down at insane Kelvin temperatures, and it tears straight through Drakken. He's never heard her cry out in pain before.

There's not much to the waiting room, either. A few set of chairs that Drakken was too tightly wound to sit in and too tightly wound _not_ to observe the exact obtuse angle at which Chair A faced Chair B (one-hundred-forty-five degrees). A small scattering of magazines that Drakken picked up, put down, and eventually attempted to read before some unholy blend of dyslexia and terror hopelessly mussed the letters. A soda machine when he'd already had at least thirteen cups of coffee and the thought of more caffeine made him feel queasy. An abstract painting on the wall that reminds him of a weasel giving birth.

Then again, _everything_ reminds him of giving birth right now, and that's why his cuticles are bleeding. He almost thinks Shego's got the easy job.

Drakken pivots yet again and stares, blearily, down at the carpet. It _does_ look slightly more threadbare than it did upon his arrival, its dark-reddish-gray the color of Mother's hair when she goes too long between rinse jobs. Mother, who is even now in there with Shego, probably offering her very shrill moral support. She is a braver soul than he.

The noises over the loudspeakers, all blaring voices and screechy feedback, do nothing to curb his rising dread. Drakken had no idea it could coexist with such sheer, scraping boredom.

He peers out the window, sweaty fingers nearly frosting on the sill. The moon is waxing, and so is his fear.

How long does it take for a twenty-inch being to enter this world, anyway? Did it get stuck somehow? Or is it simply in no hurry?

There was a time when Drakken would've concluded it would serve Shego right to have a stubborn wiseacre of a kid who did things entirely on its own terms. Now he only shakes his head and chuckles, a chuckle that evaporates when another shout he recognizes rattles the doors.

Drakken feels his teeth grit. Can't one of those fancy doctors vanquish her pain? What are they paying them for, anyway?

Another turn. Another pace. A stumble.

 _All right, I need to come up with something to occupy my brilliant mind before I go mad._

"Well, _madder_ ," he whispers, because Shego isn't here to say it.

Yes, it's long past time for some neurological stimulation. Babies - such as his soon-to-be niece or nephew - aren't the only ones who can benefit.

Well, that's not exactly taking his mind off it. The subject has a monopoly on his mind, and Drakken hurriedly scans the room for anything to challenge its hold.

He imagines a straight tightrope between the two obtuse-angle chairs and attempts to walk along it and it alone. But his vision is blurry - from tiredness or too much coffee - and he falls off and goes crashing to the ground. Luckily, he's unharmed, thanks to the tightrope only being in his mind, though he does clip a trash can pretty good with his left leg.

"Ow!" Drakken yelps. And immediately feels stupid for expressing that brief, dull pain amidst whatever Shego's suffering.

"You know, you can sit down, hon," the woman behind the desk says.

Her voice is equal parts weariness and understanding; Drakken does not mean to whirl on her and burst out with, "No, I most _certainly_ cannot sit down! She's in there - having a baby - and it's hurting her - and it's taking so long - and I've drunk way too much coffee - and - and -"

And that is when a hot convulsion grips Drakken's stomach and forces him closer to the ground than he's been all day. This, at least, deserves a gasp.

Drakken rests a hand gingerly against his abdomen and sets about shaping a theory. This isn't the anxious rumble of too much coffee - it feels more like something expanding and contracting, expanding and contracting, over and over and _over_ again.

Wait. Contracting? Contrac _tion_?

"Is something wrong, sir?" Desk Woman asks.

Drakken swallows a bitter taste and spits up sentences he never imagined himself saying. "I think I'm having sympathy labor pains. Oh, no - am I going to have a sympathy baby?!"

The nurse appears to be one lip-purse away from bursting into laughter. Drakken immediately recognizes the problem. "Well, I mean, obviously, I couldn't," he says, "since the baby comes from the uterus, and I don't even _have_ one of those." For a moment, he is ashamed to call himself a scientist, though biology was never his field of interest.

"But, still, there's this burning in my stomach," needs to be added, and not simply for the purpose of saving face.

"Where did it start?" Desk Woman's words are closer now, but they seem to be coming from the top of a massive canyon Drakken can't climb out of. "If it's on the right side, it could be your appendix, and that's very serious."

Drakken glances down at his rumpled self, trying in vain to match the smeared scope of his contacts with the all-too-vivid volcano in his guts. "Which side is right again?"

"This side." She taps on the opposite side of his scar, and although Drakken has gotten much better with physical contact in the past few years (at least according to Dr. Director), he jumps away from her as if she's come after him with a syringe.

"No, no," Drakken says. He is relieved to shake his head, even if it's entirely too light and possibly in danger of drifting away. "It started on the left side - then it just moved all over."

"Well, I've heard of sympathy pains before," Desk Woman says as she takes Drakken's hand and eases him down into one of the chairs. "But there's no such thing as a sympathy baby. So you're safe there."

Drakken only nods and permits himself to sag against the molding that isn't as stiff as it looks. Thankfulness warms him, taking the edge off his embarrassment. It feels like the first time he's exhaled all evening, but of course it can't be or he'd be dead. . .

"It sounds more like - Dr. Drakken, have you ever been treated for an ulcer?" Desk Woman says.

Drakken feels as though a hippopotamus - spray-painted with the word "DOY!" - has dropped on his cranium. "Oh. Yes. Had one on and off for a few years now. Most days it's very controllable, but tonight - "

"Tonight you've been under a lot of stress, which makes perfect sense," Desk Woman finishes for him. She smiles, and it seems real, not the type that's as much a part of her uniform as the nametag. "You just settle right down in there and I'll get you some wet paper towels, okay?"

Ahhh, yes. A kind person. The one specimen that never ceases to amaze Drakken, no matter how many he encounters.

Within - well, Drakken has lost all track of anything other than "soon" - so, _soon_ Desk Woman returns and presses cold comfort to his forehead. There is no scientific reason why that sensation should settle his stomach, too, and yet it does, right down to only a few agitated grumbles, just talking big the way Drakken used to as a villain. Only a scrap of guilt peeks through.

"I'm terribly sorry to be such a bother," Drakken says. The words tilt a little to the side on their way out.

"Oh, no trouble at all." There is also no scientific way to hear someone winking, but Drakken is _sure_ he does. "We do this for husbands all the time."

"I'm the brother." It's not even a lie anymore.

There is a short, muffled laugh.

It is not one of the forms that mockery tends to take, in Drakken's experience. He rolls the towels up to where they can balance on his temples; hikes his feet, still afire with tingles, on the underside of the chair; and jives his just-as-tingly fingers up and down the plastic arms. He will rest, but relaxation is a whole other story. In a whole other book. On a whole other shelf.

Especially when another Shego-scream rises. It splits the air for an endless second and is then superseded by another sound - a clean, pure wail.

And _that_ 's not coming from Shego.

Drakken's heartbeat skips like a scratched record, sending a bolt of jagged energy to his quadriceps, which spasm before him. All traces of tedium disappear.

Minutes tick by - no, hours - no, _days_! Drakken's eyes fly open just as one of the terrifying glass doors also swings open. A doctor - an _obstetrician_ , to be technical - appears in the entryway, her hair tumbling out of a businesslike bun.

Drakken nearly overturns his chair as he struggles to his feet. The paper towels slip to the ground in a sodden heap. His own stand feels every bit as waterlogged and tissue-thin as they are.

"Dr. Drakken?" the obstetrician says. Even to his over-caffeinated eyes, she appears to be wearing a smile.

Smiles are good - yes?

"Yes, that's me," Drakken says, not even bothering to say _I_ instead of _me_ , not even pretending to have collected himself. He knows an impossibility when he sees one. (Sometimes.) "Is it Shego? Is she - ?"

"The baby's been born," the obstetrician says calmly. "She's asking to see you."

Meaning Shego, Drakken surmises after a few muddled seconds. Not the baby.

He follows the obstetrician behind the glass panes down a door-lined hallway, where in every room a mother waits - expectantly, in every sense of the word - to exchange her pain for a child. The magnitude of the situation strikes Drakken like a misdirected electrical current (only without the most-unpleasant charred skin) and he sprints into the room faster than an ethanol-powered rocket. (Which don't generally sprint, but who _cares_ at this point?) His boots squeak to a stop as soon as he's inside, doubtlessly leaving long black treads behind him on the spotless sterile floor.

Which he's sorry about, but his almost-sister just had a baby here!

And the strain of that it is all over her. Shego's cheeks are flushed magenta, maybe the first color he's ever seen in them. She's every bit as pretty with it and her disheveled hair and the weary bags under her eyes as she was all gussied up on her wedding day.

Drakken feels suddenly, uncharacteristically shy. He hangs just inside the doorway until Shego lifts an arm and beckons him toward her. The off-white hospital gown drapes over her elegant shoulders like a shawl. Barkin stands beside her, his usually tanned face a sallow shade of green. He and Shego now match quite nicely, Drakken decides.

A nurse moves aside to allow Drakken a straight shot at the bed - given his stiff, twiglike legs, one is probably necessary. He walks to the bedside, arms flopping long and ungraceful at his sides, bends down, and rests his chin on the top of Shego's head. It feels like a doormat under his unshaven (yet still mostly smooth) chin, not at all the silken gloss he's used to.

"Are you okay?" Drakken asks warily.

The corners of Shego's mouth tweak, too exhausted to smile. "Am now."

"I was in Operation Desert Storm, and I never saw anything quite that gruesome," Barkin shudders. But his eyes are teary-tender in a new way.

Drakken does another quick scan of the room. Mother stands a yard away, her own tears flowing freely. Her hands clasp and unclasp at her waist, fidgeting in the air, a sure sign that she is about to start chirping, _Ohhh, isn't it WONDERFUL, Drewbie?_

It is. It truly is. All Drakken has eyes for, however, is the guest of honor: the tiny crib at the base of the bed - a _bassinet_ , Shego called it.

Well, not the bassinet itself, of course. What's - who's in the - in the -

"Am I an aunt or an uncle?" Drakken blurts out.

Shego bursts into a half-crazed laugh. "Oh, man, I _needed_ that."

Drakken can feel a blotchy mess on his face as he twists it at Shego. "I _me-ant_ ," he said, his customary boom sliding up to a whine, "is it a boy or a girl?"

"It's a little girl," the obstetrician says, barely above a whisper.

And then everything imperfect ceases to be relevant.

Somehow, Drakken is able to pick his way to the bassinet and curve his already-achy back over to see inside. His - his _niece_ is wrapped in a pink blanket, her wet black slick of hair already thick enough to require a lighter-pink hairbow to clip it back. Her skin is calming down from its newborn redness to an otherworldly pale. She has a baby-pudgy fist thrust in the air for no apparent reason, and Drakken can already tell what a little spitfire she's going to be.

Just like her mama.

Drakken swallows hard, unable to look away. "What - what's - does she have a name yet?" he says.

"Nicole," Shego says.

"Nicole?"

"Yeah. I've just always liked that name." It must be the night for hearing inaudible things, because Shego's voice seems to shrug. "Don't ask me why. I think we're gonna call her Nikki, though."

Of course. Perfect.

Drakken bends closer and gulps again. "Hello, Nikki," he says, in a coo that comes surprisingly easily to him. "Hi there. I'm your Uncle Drakken."

Her big eyes - _Midnight Blue_ would be the crayon he'd use to draw them - widen further when she sees him, but she doesn't break into sobs. This is amazing, especially considering the state he's undoubtedly in. His own face is glowing with sweat from the U of his chin to the V of his widow's peak. He must look a fright.

Surely she cannot love him yet, Drakken thinks, and yet that potential is there in the look she gives him, and something comes unraveled inside him.

He begins to giggle, the noise just shy of hysteria. The antiseptic smell and the bright florescent lights sting his senses and compound the drumbeat in his temples.

"Healthy as a horse," the nurse comments. Nikki's foot thrusts upward to meet her fist, as if to protest being compared to an equine, and Drakken sucks in a gasp - he forgot human feet came in sizes smaller than his. "And beautiful."

And although Drakken knows he cannot take any credit for any of it, pride lathers in his chest anyway.

"Would you like to hold her?" the nurse says.

Drakken's fingers become one with the crib sides; he cannot pry them loose. "Oh, well - I - um - of course -" He frees one hand enough to waft it in Mother's general direction. "But she should go first, right?"

The nurse bends down and scoops Nikki up. "What do you say, little Nikki? You want to go see Grandma?"

Mother squeals so loudly that Drakken is certain they must hear her in the other delivery rooms - and that they must think _she_ is the one in the process of giving birth. "Come to Gram-Gram!" she says.

Barkin has a camera out, clicking pictures, which is good because Drakken couldn't take a snapshot if his reputation depended on it. He can't speak, either, with or without the boom. He can only watch as the bundle is placed in his mother's dimpled arms, and she leans over, in rapture, to rearrange the blanket around her first grandchild's face. The moment of longing delivered is so beautiful, Drakken almost has to squint to look at it - the way one does when viewing a wondrous sunset.

Or when one remembers bowing under the liberating weight of a medal he didn't have to steal at ray-gunpoint.

Drakken has no idea how much time has passed before Mother finally hands Nikki back to the nurse. He hasn't been able to locate a clock, and it feels like it has been, simultaneously, hours and nanoseconds since he walked back here. All he knows is that the nurse is then holding Nikki out to him, and he inhales sharply, as if he's stepped on a Lego.

"I - I - is it okay?" Drakken croaks. His arms are already shivering, clumsy with nerves, their fear of dropping her making him (ironically) that much more likely to drop her. He can't afford to be sloppy now.

The nurse's smile is every bit as kind as Desk Lady's. "You can sit down, if it'll make you feel better."

"Yes. Sitting down..." Drakken aims his buns at a plastic box of a chair and hits it on the second try. "All righty, then. Um - do I - do I have to do something special?"

Shego is out-and-out cackling in the background. He spares her a stuck-out tongue because she just spent five hours in labor.

"Hold your arms together like this," the obstetrician says. She presses his arms tangent to one another and holds them there. "And keep them like that. Newborns have these huge honkin' heads that need a lot of support."

A wisp of fear, like a trace of secondhand smoke, curls through Drakken. "What if I start to mess up?"

"Then we'll take her back." The nurse squats beside the chair and slips Nikki into Drakken's arms.

Drakken does not notice right away that his arms immediately lock down like airplane trays, as if they have the slightest clue what they're doing after all. He doesn't notice that his knees stop shaking and his legs straighten and the crick in his back throbs away to nothing.

All he notices is the person Shego made. Her scrunched-up lips, her dark dusting of eyebrows, the fingernails little wax drops that make his bitten-down ones seem long in comparison.

If Nikki can feel how hard his chest heaves with a banging heart and nervous lungs, she doesn't mind. She yawns, rests her head against the chest in question, and silently trusts him.

 _Wow_ cannot do it justice.

* * *

 _Dude, she's ten minutes old and she's already got you wrapped._

Shego shakes her head and snickers to herself. She watched Drakken melt on the spot the minute the obstetrician announced it was a girl.

Not that she can blame him.

Shego was nervous - sort of a new experience for her - when she found out she was pregnant. Even _she_ knows that every halfway-decent mom has to be so kind, so patient, so understanding, and Shego will freely admit to being exactly none-of-the-above.

It isn't that she doesn't know what love is. _That_ 's a confession she wouldn't give up under threat of waterboarding, but it's there for a few people, a little different for each of 'em. With her brothers, it's more tolerance than anything else. For Mama Lipsky, it's all about gratitude. Drakken's manifests itself as the urge to claw at whoever gives him a hard time. And with Stevie, it's a mixture of affection and attraction and _holy-crow-I-can-actually-RELATE-to-him_.

But just because Shego has a womb doesn't give her whatever gooey thing makes Mama L. squish Drakken's cheeks and give him baby names and practically spoon food into his pushing-fifty mouth. That all struck her as a little too fairy-tale. Heck, just an hour ago, she didn't know if she'd be able to forgive the kid for ripping her insides to shreds on the way out.

Then Nikki slid into the world, red and wrinkled and slimy - about as far from Gerber material as you could get. The nurses picked her up and moved her, and she chewed them out at full inherited-from-Daddy volume, screaming and kicking and fighting.

Shego liked her right away.

And as soon as Nikki was rinsed and put into her arms, something thick sauntered into Shego's chest and parked itself down like it _belonged_ there or something. It was like a roundhouse-kick to the collarbone, and there was nothing fairy-tale about it. Anything that painful has to be real.

"Hey, squirt," Shego whispered to the squalling little body. "So I guess I'm your mommy now."

Yikes. And here she thought she'd had _plenty_ of experience being gazed at like she was holy.

Now she watches as Drakken examines his new niece, holding her with _way_ more caution than he ever used with one of his press-a-button-and-blow-up-half-the-planet machines. Even numbed with fatigue, Shego's feelin' it all. And in spite of what a whiny, selfish brat the Doc used to be - and still can be sometimes - he's a lot better at this whole "loving" thing.

"Don't worry," Shego hears Drakken whisper to Nikki - because Dr. D.'s totally incapable of an _actual_ whisper. "I won't let you fall."

Something glistens its way down Drakken's cheek and lands with a splash on Nikki's pink blanket. Shego doesn't even see the need to scoff. It's just so Drakken.

Still, when Shego looks at him, she isn't seeing the corny little doofus who accidentally scratched an itch with a Category-10 blade or planned to move the continents without factoring in earthquakes. He seems older somehow, even with the little-kid face and the hair still pitch-black. And even though he hasn't gained an ounce since Shego left him in the waiting room, Drakken's giving off some strength, too.

For a crazy second, Shego pictures him as a father himself - one who'll forget to buy diapers and heat formula in a test tube instead of a bottle.

And she doesn't pity his future kids at all.

The nurse has to nearly wedge a crowbar into Dr. D's grip to get Nikki back. Only _then_ does he shoot up from his seat and hyperventilate into his hands until he turns pink.

"Oh, Shego!" he gasps. "Ohhh, Shego, this is all - so - marvelous! I - I - I love her! This is - ohhh! Oh, I need to get some air!"

Drakken tears from the room, ponytail bobbing behind him like an exclamation mark. Shego can't muster up the energy to smirk, but she feels the wry familiarity inside. Classic Dr. D.

And as soon as he "calms down" - about twenty minutes later - he pokes his shaggy head back into the room and begs, "Can I hold her again?"

* * *

 _O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!_

That is the closest Drakken's thoughts can come to expressing such pure, infectious joy. He looks down into that breathtaking sculpture of a face, a mirror of the one he never got to view in this stage of fragile innocence - a face of second chances.

He will give Nikki all of the things that came too late for Shego to have a happy childhood. He will help her deal with all the problems he was too preoccupied-with-himself to help his smart-mouthed sidekick through. He will try with all his intellectual and emotional might to make sure that she isn't afraid to share her problems with her family.

People who feel rootless often turn out ruthless.

One of the few things that still boils hatefully inside Drakken is the chain of events that left Shego with superpowers and _without_ parents so early on in her life. Several times he has picked up his portable time machine and seriously considered traveling back, fixing it for her.

Then again, a happy, healthy Shego probably never would have shown up on his doorstep, and _then_ where would he be?

Excess water molecules form in Drakken's eyes. Fighting against sleepy eyes, Nikki holds his finger in the strong grip that Drakken has read prenatal surgeons say develops even before birth. With this child's lineage, it wouldn't surprise Drakken if she already knows kung fu.

He glances down again, his eyes still full. Full of things that cannot be tears, because tears signal pain, sorrow, itching chests that need soothing. These come rapidly, naturally, comfortably, like his flowers.

("Liquid silver" would be a more poetic comparison, but that stuff can poison you, no kidding. Even - strangely enough - turn you blue.)

Nikki is so beautiful, Drakken thinks, even with beet-colored creases still randomized on her skin. Everything on her is exquisitely, precisely formed, and on such a miniaturized scale, like one of those sculptures in _Ripley's Believe It or Not_ that fits on a safety pin - there was one perfect replica of the Seven Dwarfs.

The things that cannot be tears shiver on Drakken's lower lashes. A renegade one escapes, and he doesn't dare move to brush it away. Instead, he draws Nikki closer to his torso, where the ulcer lies quiet and flat and his limbs are still enough to be wood planks if not for the coffee cartwheeling through their veins.

 _I should call Dr. Director,_ Drakken thinks vaguely, somewhat sleepy-eyed himself. _She'll want me to do a podcast on birth, won't she?_

He is too tired, too exhilarated, to hunt down an answer from the crevices of his overwhelmed mind. Drakken just knows he would be more than glad to do a podcast, only a podcast isn't nearly enough. His wish is to hug Desk Lady for her kindness, embrace the obstetrician and her nurse for their assistance, to scale Mount Everest - okay, maybe fly his hovercraft to the peak of Mount Everest - and announce to the whole world what a miracle of human biology has just taken place here in this dinky little pristine room.

And maybe the world will listen.

Drakken pauses a moment to be grateful for that new leaf he wound up turning over so many years ago. What going good has to do with turning over leaves, he might never figure out, but the important thing is, having even one person comment on his niece's breathtaking freshness renders the idea of a mind-control ray as hollow as a scraped-out yogurt cup.

And there would be no room for world domination anyway. Because, as he gazes down on his precious wax-drop of a niece, he knows protecting her is his new mission in life.

Drakken strokes Nikki's bow once before relinquishing her to her daddy's arms. Part of Drakken wants to cry, _Be careful!_ \- Barkin's huge, squared-off hands could crush that delicate baby with one wrong twitch.

Yet Barkin seemingly has another side - perhaps a side as small and anxious as Drakken himself - that wins out, and he cups Nikki's body, supports her itty-bitty head, and otherwise acknowledges her as the exact opposite of the footballs he tosses around so casually.

Drakken relaxes enough to breathe, stand up, and hover over Barkin's shoulder. "Can you say, 'I love you, Uncle Drakken'?" he asks Nikki.

"Um, no, not yet, Dr. Spock," Shego says.

Something automatic pings in Drakken's mind, though he knows it would be ridiculous to say it. He goes ahead and says it anyway, with a twist of irony: "I want to hear it from her!"

"Drakken!"

Drakken doesn't know if that snap is playful or not, and since she has very justifiable grounds for crankiness, he sits back down and tucks his legs up under the chair to remain as unobtrusive as possible. He has not had much practice at it, but the last thing he wants is to be tossed back to the waiting room with the chairs like Popsicle molds and the weasel painting.

(Okay, so maybe being attacked by a rabid beaver would rank below that, but still. . .)

"I already called Possible and Stoppable," grunts Barkin - he will never seem a "Stevie" to Drakken.

Oh, goody! Stoppable is one of the few people who can always be trusted to meet Drakken's excitement right where it is.

"Great. But I need to make another call." Shego flips her face back toward the obstetrician, the matter-of-factness on it cracking at the edges. "To someplace else in the hospital, if you don't mind."

The hitch in her voice would go undetected to the average listener. It takes even Drakken, with his very-keen instincts in regards to his best friend, a moment to piece together where she's going with this.

"Where to?" the nurse asks.

"The radiation recovery ward," Shego says. Her eyes twinkle, bits of broken glass reflecting unexpected light. "They got a couple patients in there who need to know they're grandparents."

 **~"Frabjous day" nonsense copyright Lewis Carroll.~**


	27. Humanoid

**~So, how did the Bebes come back in _Queen Bebe_ , without even a _mention_ (that I recall) of Drakken in the episode? One of the Pick-a-Villain books came the theory that he rebuilt them just in case and a "cell phone signal" brought them back to life while "Drakken was on vacation." The book doesn't follow canon that well, but it's the closest thing to a canon explanation we've gotten. . . and it was enough to inspire me.**

 **The Return of the Bebes: now with Drakken. Because most stories can be improved by adding Drakken. ;)**

 **Thanks so much to everyone who's reviewed!~**

The _size of a mad scientist's anxiety increases in direct proportion to the length of time his sidekick/bodyguard has been gone._

This is Dr. Drakken's First Law of Neurological Activity.

Drakken takes a reluctant seat and crosses his legs so that the calves wind together, reaches for a ballpoint pen and pulls the cap off, shifts his brain into Contemplative Mode. Shego is only on Day Four of her two-week end-of-summer vacation, and he misses her already. He's been too plagued by nerves to even begin work on another evil scheme.

Because what if Kim Possible storms his lair? Then he'll have no warrior women to sic on her. It's not as though he has a spare stashed in the hall closet!

That's without even commenting on the lack of scintillating conversation. The henchmen tend to go comatose when one uses a big word - such as _scintillating_ or _comatose_ \- and with such a gap in intelligence, Drakken fears he might sink to their levels.

Besides, the last time Shego went on vacation, he wound up at the North Pole within two hours of her departure. Granted, that had been over Christmas - and it was mostly due to that Stoppable kid's bumbling - and it turned out to be a pleasant experience, all in all, if one doesn't count the polar bear.

Drakken scolds himself for the sweat starting to dribble down his forehead. It's the height of unprofessionalism. The world just seems so wild and unpredictable without Shego beating it all back into place.

Oh, if only she had agreed to be cloned! He'd have a Shego by his side right now - one on either side, if that's what Drakken wants, and he wasn't so sure it is. (Stereo sarcasm wouldn't be good for the blood pressure.) And without her, the cloning plot had turned into a debacle, which Drakken supposes _might_ have _possibly_ been his own fault, though if someone else wants to take the blame, he certainly won't object.

And then the time before that he felt was too petty a grudge to call her in over. That was when he'd had the Bebes.

Of course. Of _course_.

The Bebes.

Drakken went back to the convention hall after Shego sprung him from jail to see what he could salvage of his once-proud robots. It was hard to see them, the works of his hands, scattered far and thin, declaring him the lose - well, err, the non-victorious one in this battle. The pieces seemed to leer up at him, seemed to say, _See,_ this _is what happens when you mess with Kim Possible._

He swallowed hard and set about collecting the pieces of his robots and his self-confidence. No, this was what happened when Kim Possible had her fifth lucky break in a row. The odds of her ever having another were becoming smaller and smaller by the minute.

(She's had at least two dozen more since then.)

Kept those pieces, too, because who knew when you might need them again? Yes, even though they had turned on him. Unlike Victor Frankenstein, Dr. Drakken is a forgiving master. It's one of the reasons he'll make a superlative ruler of the world ( _superlative_ being a fancy way of saying _better than the whole lot of them_ ).

Drakken pauses for a brief second, tapping his pen cap against his teeth and listening to it _click, click, click_ against their porcelain. He could use someone to patrol the lair's borders while Shego's gone. Someone who he can trust not to go through his personal drawers and find those spare glasses and the report cards he kept because the science teacher he was in love with signed them with her very own, beautiful hand. . .

Anyway.

The pieces are in Lab E, he thinks. Or is it C? No, no, no, it's Lab B - for _Bebe_ , Drakken recalls now.

He tears down the corridor, makes a left, takes a right, hop-skip-jumps over an enclosed lava flow, and scoots down another hallway to find himself at the doorway of Lab B. Once inside, Drakken flings open the closet door and rummages through sundry mad-genius items. He tosses aside several papers, assorted circuit boards, and a Magic 8 Ball before his hands land on something promisingly jointed.

The air Drakken reminds himself to suck in stalls in his bronchial tubes as he pulls out a silvery-blue leg shaped like a slender chicken drumstick. He wonders, for a second, what about these things makes his cousin Eddy and some other men go as berserk as they do. They are nothing more than construction parts, as far as Drakken is concerned.

That's how the Bebes were designed, though, with a cruel twist: that they closely resemble his posse's ideal dates, minus the blue skin (to show it didn't disqualify you from good looks) and the red eyes (to strike fear into their hearts). Oh, and the ability to turn their humanoid bodies into giant metal spiders. That Drakken got off an old cable horror movie called _Attack of the Contortionist_ or something.

A torso comes next and then a head with a sorrowful dent in its cheekbone. This is Bebe 1, the quickest of the bunch. Quickest to fight. Quickest to anger. Quickest to rebel.

Drakken shivers a little. Yes, he'll definitely have to fix _that_ trait.

Elsewhere in that box lie Bebes 2 and 3. 2 relishes contorting for no reason other than to watch the flesh crawl on people's arms. A bit of a sadist - Drakken loves that in a sidekick.

And 3 is Drakken's favorite, though he'll never tell the others. She is somewhat more sensitive than the others, more in tune with the spirit behind Drakken's orders, and he's convinced that she only rebelled along with her sisters because it's true, blood - or in their case, grease? - is thicker than water. She was the last one left in the fight, and Drakken had been sincerely hoping she'd manage to rid the world of Kim Possible. And now that she was fulfilling her purpose, surely she wouldn't have continued attacking Drakken after that little brat was gone.

Right?

Drakken fingers the black metal molded into the shape of microshorts. Even through his gloves, he can feel its coldness - a silent, heartless coldness that Drakken hasn't yet achieved for himself.

A sinister laugh rumbles up from the depths of Drakken's chest as he switches to stroking Bebe 1's pointed shoulder. A thick layer of dust comes off and pollutes the air. The Sinister Laugh program crashes in a fit of hacking coughs.

Drat.

* * *

"Quit playing games with my head." Drakken sings in harmony to the _rrrhowlr_ of his welding torch as he waves it back and forth. "I don't want to be a complex boy - boy - boy - boy - boy -"

Drakken lets the word bounce around on his tongue as if it's rubberized. It distracts him from the lonesome echo of the mile-high ceilings and the all-around emptiness. Without an outlet for his fiendishly clever mind, a well-done evil lair can sure depress you.

He turns the torch off and flips his goggles up - in that order, because temporary blindness is never any fun - to examine his handiwork. Bebe 3's torso and legs are connected again.

Drakken gives her a congratulatory pat on the waist. Pain of all different colors shoots straight through Drakken's hand. He hisses and pulls it away, shaking and flailing until he's sure the fingers will waggle off, crying, "Ngggh! Oh! Pain!"

That metal isn't cold anymore. There will be white dots on his palms for sure, and they will smart for _days_.

At least now Bebe 3 can stand in the corner, upright albeit headless, like a mannequin. What is the deal with those things anymore, anyway? Back in Drakken's day, _no one_ without a head was considered glamorous. . .

Drakken switches songs over to, "Oh, the foot bone's connected to the - leg bone. The leg bone's connected to the - thigh bone."

He makes it up to "neck bone" before stopping and screwing up his face. Now what? "Cranium" doesn't rhyme, and "skull bone" sounds simply preposterous!

Oh, well. The Bebes don't even, technically, _have_ bones.

Drakken picks up Bebe 2's pelvis. It cracked in two when she blew apart, and the right half sits heavy on his tender hand. It is fairly easy to rebuild a robot's body, but he's never yet found a metal that can replicate the human body's natural healing. If he did, he'd be grafting it on to the Bebes right now. . .

That's when his gaze catches on Bebe 1's disembodied head, resting on the tile a yard away. Her mouth hangs open, exactly as it did when she recited the words, _Drakken is unfit for command._

Another shiver. No, he'll work on loyalty first, _then_ indestructibility.

 _See, Shego?_ Drakken mentally gloats. _Not just any old half-wit would think that through._

**********  
It's the Bebes' heads that need the most work.

Oh, not so much the physical heads themselves - although those have several nicks and dings from their encounter with Kim Possible. It's the brains, whatever they had in them that caused them to disobey, that thing that made Bob Chen shake his head and chuckle, "It's college all over again. That man _cannot_ build a robot."

As if they _were_ all back in college, sharing a six-pack of soda and lobbing brainteasers at each other. As if nothing had changed. . . and nothing ever will.

A wintry taste fills Drakken's mouth. "See, _this_ is why I need the world!" he hollers.

Bebe 3, facedown on the table across from him, doesn't agree, but she doesn't undermine him, either.

"I'll show them," Drakken mutters as he carefully slides a panel out from her neck to reveal her intricate wiring. "I'll show them all."

Bob Chen is, after all, a poor ignorant soul who hasn't read as much classic sci-fi as Drakken has. Anyone who _has_ would know that it takes an indisputable genius to create AI smart enough to question its creator. That has to mean the Bebes _weren't_ smarter than him after all! Of course, if they weren't, that actually makes him less of a genius, because he _wasn't_ able to create something smarter than he is. . .

It's like that "their are tree mistakes in this sentence" sentence, where one of the three is that there are only two.

At any rate, their AIQ is programmed to stop at 120 now. Still nicely above average for carrying out Drakken's bidding, yet not smart enough that arrogance comes with it. This is a concept Drakken understands well.

Each hand-motion now is so extraordinarily delicate that Drakken licks his lips and funnels all of his concentration into the task. It works; his palm ceases to sting, and the rest of his surroundings fall away. There might as well in the whole of the universe be only Dr. Drakken and the mechanical mind he is reprogramming.

Intelligence dialed down to that reasonable degree.

Loyalty ratcheted up.

 _Human Emotions? Eliminate._ Drakken had naively plugged those in so the Bebes would be as desperate to avoid failure as he was. But embarrassment and anger only made them vulnerable. If Drakken could only wipe _himself_ of human emotions, surely he'd be sitting on a throne by now.

 _Sense of self? Better tone that down._

The Bebes need to know they're mere machines, after all. Perfect machines, yes, but not in any position to question their human leader.

Drakken takes another moment to upgrade himself in their esteem.

It is the closest he's ever come to mind control, and it's as delicious as slurping a chocolate malt. Through a crazy straw. Someday he will tamper with brains far more sacred, if it comes to that.

Drakken replaces the neck panel. The purposefully dimmed light reflects off each flawless blond tress draping across the back of Bebe 3's neck. For an instant, she looks so human, and the enormity of what he has done overwhelms Drakken. This means Bebe 3 will no longer be sensitive. She will not pass her hand across his forehead to comfort him before leaping into battle. She will hold him in respect rather than affection.

He has engineered the world's most perfect servants. And it saddens him.

He must miss Shego more than he thought.

* * *

"Ladies and gentlemen!" Drakken booms down the hallway, despite his lack of an audience. "Presenting, for the first - well, the second - time, live and in person: grade-A premium Bebes!"

The red eyes open, cinnamon dots on blue. In this lighting, the Bebes don't appear human at all anymore. They can unhinge their jaws even farther than Drakken can drop his. They move at a speed not even an Olympic athlete can match. They are lean and limber and will never know the rusted, aging spine he contends with.

One glance at them, and Drakken feels as though he's been transported back to the convention hall. Of course he hasn't, and yet he can smell the lingering odor of the knockout gas and hear the hum of the ingenious force field behind him. And he can see his posse - his "friends" - as he waited for the empathy to twist their faces for even a second or two.

Instead, they gaped open in laughter.

Drakken grinds the heels of his hands into his under-eye bags. He is not afraid of crying; his eyeballs are too scorched and furious for that. Something, in fact, hardens inside him as though it's been exposed to dry ice.

"State your names," he says.

"I am Bebe," all three say in unison.

"Correct." Drakken smiles for perhaps the first time all day. "And who am _I_?"

"You are Dr. Drakken," Bebe 1 says.

"You are our leader," Bebe 2 says.

And Bebe 3 adds, "You are perfect."

Mad scientists are allowed to lie, after all.

"Ohhh, listen to you girls!" Drakken claps his hands with the force of a cymbal monkey and sniffs. "They grow up so fast. . ."

Drakken glances at the digital clock on Lab B's desk. While he's too far away to read the exact numbers, the AM letters on the top have blinked on. Shego would call it "the middle of the night," but to be strictly accurate, that would be six in the evening. Now it's the beginning of the morning.

Over eight hours of blood, sweat, and tears. Well, mostly just sweat - productive sweat, which is far less sticky and annoying than nervous sweat. The only tears are ones of pride.

And if there is blood, it won't be his.

A spidery thought tickles at the back of Drakken's mind and slinks away again.

He stretches fatigued muscles and yawns in the Bebes' direction. "Well, I'm off to bed. You ladies can handle any _problems_ that may arise in the meantime, yes?"

There is a chorus of, "Yes, Dr. Drakken" as they line up near the closet doorway. More chocolate milk to the soul.

Drakken stumbles back to bed. He fully intends to change into his pajamas, but winds up collapsing into bed, limbs immovable, first thing. Before he can so much as remove his boots, he falls into the first dreamless sleep he's had in ages.

Because he has some spare warrior women stashed in the hall closet.

* * *

Life has a way of throwing baseballs at you when you don't expect it and then laughing at you when you don't know enough about baseball to hit them.

Baseball number one: Drakken has a doctor's appointment the next day. In the normal course of things, he _hate-hate-hates_ going to the doctor, but since his scorched hand is still paining him, he reluctantly visits Dr. Truman.

Truman studies his palm for five minutes as if he's planning to predict Drakken's future before wrapping it in gauze and declaring it "mild."

What isn't mild is Drakken's blood pressure. While it hasn't reached a level requiring medication yet, Dr. Truman says, it's elevated, and it's almost certainly stress-induced.

Drakken tries to argue that point, but he winds up bulging his neck veins and, he knows, looking the very essence of hypertension.

Baseball number two: Dr. Truman urges Drakken to take a vacation. And with no evil schemes in the ol' potboiler otherwise known as his genius brain, Drakken agrees. After all, Shego's already taken her leave of absence - taking his at the same time will overlap their vacations like those lovely Venn diagrams, thus maximizing work time when they both return.

Besides, what's more relaxing than dipping in the ocean once his hand heals, building sandcastles, and watching cartoons on channels he doesn't get anymore now ever since that "cable" fad started?

Baseball number three: Drakken forgets to bring his cell phone. Which actually may help contribute to the lack of stress. No telemarketers to yell at. No missed-call beeps from his voice mail. No Internet button to accidentally push, followed by a frantic hitting of the "back" button to keep from being charged two thousand dollars for it.

Before he left, Drakken deactivated the Bebes and placed them in the front storage closet. "Stay," he commanded them.

He probably shouldn't be surprised if they don't listen. But he is.

* * *

When Drakken finally drags himself back home a week later, it's only because his credit cards have gone stale - or whatever you call it when a card has racked up a debt five times over what you have in your bank account.

His lair is still ominously dark and shadowed, just the way Drakken likes it, and he only slides the dimmer switch up one notch. He _does_ take a moment to dial up the thermostat; he's chilled from the ocean water soaking his over-the-shoulders swimsuit against his torso.

At least it isn't swimming pool water. Swimming pool water is _cold_ and sharp from its artificial chemicals, and what's the point of having an indoor pool at a beachside hotel anyway? The only advantage Drakken can think of is that there have never been any shark sightings at a pool.

Although that _would_ be a wonderful plan if he ever needed to conquer a hotel! Oooh, if Shego were here, he'd bounce it off her right now.

For an ego-expanding moment, Drakken lets himself picture Shego's eyes going saucer-round and her smart mouth stunned into silence. Then it disappears into the almost-reality of her saying something along the lines of, _And how do you expect to get the sharks THERE, Oh-So-Wise-Genius?_

The words would come out flatter than pancakes, that tone meaning she sees Drakken as exactly the opposite. Just the same as his old posse last year. . .

He squirms in his wet swimsuit, the prickles prickling. Yes, he is _too_ a genius! There were just some things he hadn't figured out back then - like how to make your robots appropriately submissive and how to eat sushi without the rice dropping out of your mouth and making you look like some rice-spewing monster off the Sci-Fi channel.

Okay, so he still hasn't mastered that one. . .

Drakken shakes off the thought and pads down the hallway, his wet sandals hugging the floor and then pulling loose with suckery sounds. Behind those monstrous metal doors, his henchmen wait as loyally as the little dog he's entrusted to their care.

Commodore Puddles sets up a barking growl when the doors slide open. As soon as he sees Drakken, however, the growl dies and he runs up to lick Drakken's salty-wet form from head to toe. Drakken laughs heartily.

The henchmen, thankfully, neither bark nor growl nor lick him. They just set up a cheer upon recognizing him. Well, all right, so it's only about a quarter of a cheer, the kind you get from your Gameboy when you finished the level in just enough time to earn a measly one star.

Yet it is better than nothing, and Drakken waves his hands in the air as though they are offering him the key to the city - oh, he'll go ahead and dream big - the key to the world! "Thank you, thank you," he says, in as modest a voice as he can muster. "Yes, your boss has returned home."

"Welcome back, Boss!" Fred says.

"Yeah, you're just in time for Bowling Night!" Mark adds.

Drakken claps his hands together. "Oooh, goody! I forgot about Bowling Night! Let me go get my ball!"

It is the perfect cap to his vacation: beating the pants (well, the sinister full-body jumpsuits) off his henchmen at the bowling alley. Drakken is grinning to himself as he swings open the door to Entrance Hall B.

If he were Shego, he would have cried, "Something is not right!" as soon as he walked into the lair - he'd swear that girl has a sixth sense. Or a seventh or an eighth. She can practically sense when an atom loses an electron somewhere in the room, a skill Drakken has long envied her.

But for Drakken, it's only when he steps into the Entrance Hall Main Room that he's hit with a vague sensation of dread, same as when he used to realize he'd contaminated a very valuable specimen by spewing his own ranting saliva onto it. Something is amiss - and he can't finger what.

Until he notices the closet door is open. _Open_ as in, _lying trampled on the floor._

And empty.

Well, not _entirely_ empty. Drakken still catches sight of his winter earmuffs, a few old magazines, and the hatchet he bought on Ebay to further his intimidating aesthetics. The only things missing are. . . the Bebes.

Drakken leans against the wall and forces himself to breathe, hard, deep breaths from the farthest reaches of his lungs. It's the only thing that grounds him to the open-closet, no-Bebe reality in front of him.

The rest of the room, which Drakken frantically scans twenty times, is in its usual methodical mess. File cabinets gawking open. The rug overturned into a sideways crumple. Blueprints scattered willy-nilly across his desk. He only has eyes for - _has eyes only for_ \- most people mess that phrase up, according to _Reader's Digest_ -

At any rate, all he's looking for are the Bebes, and he can't find them, and he's panicking!

Drakken plasters himself even tighter against the wall and digs both hands into the sides of the hair that's drying in stiffer-than-usual spikes and near-curls. Somehow, his respiration cycle continues, but his thoughts are deformed as if born from lack of oxygen to his brain.

 _Bebes._

 _Gone._

 _How?_

 _I didn't -_

 _Can't - walk away -_

 _At least - not - deactivated - ones_

 _And - henchmen - didn't - notice_

 _\- Course - not - never - do_

 _Where - did - how -_

 _Calm._

 _Calm._

 _Not calm!_

 _Must be - reasonable explanation -_

At those last few syllables, Drakken can feel himself settling somewhat. Yes, of course there is a reasonable explanation. Obviously this was not the work of little magical elves. Someone real must have messed something up badly.

Hopefully this "someone" was not Dr. Drakken himself.

Drakken raises his head to breathe again and takes a big whiff while he's at it. You can't smell electricity, not in the strictest sense, but there is a definite staticky scent that bristles his nose hairs and rings in the air like the hotel television set on half-mute.

He follows his nose hairs to the cell phone lying, flipped-open and crooked, atop the heap of blueprints.

Drakken reaches out to touch it, and a shock zips up his arm, fuzzying the muscles. "Doodles!" he yips, burying the re-injured hand in his left armpit.

This phone has sent out a serious charge sometime in the past week. Perhaps one strong enough to re-activate the Bebes?

One of Drakken's fingers shoots out, pecks at the phone, and then retracts before it can be used as an electrical conductor. The screen informs him he has "15 missed calls - from Mother."

It _would_ be Mother.

Baseballs four, five, and six are chucked at him, with absolutely no regard for the three-strikes-you're-out rule that even _Drakken_ is familiar with.

Drakken frowns to himself, then traces the path of the cell phone's antenna. It leads straight to the closet - well, actually, about two inches off from the closet - certainly close enough, though.

Well, there's that mystery solved, and without any need for Shego's input, to boot! Drakken rewards himself with a pat for a job well done, and then he realizes the implications of this, and his hand halts in mid-pat. His Bebes - his flippy-haired perfect weapons of virtual indestructibility - have been released, purposeless and emotionless, on an unsuspecting world?!

 _That couldn't be better if I'd planned it myself._

Maybe he _did_ plan it himself, somehow. Maybe there's some faraway, subconscious corner of himself that is so overqualified at evil-genius scheming that it runs ahead, always on high alert even when the rest of him is on vacation!

Hey, a megalomaniac can dream, can't he?

Drakken picks up the television remote and twirls it between his fingers like the happenin' dude he is ("happenin'" being the teen-slang upgrade from "groovy"). One thumb jerks in his excitement, clicking the power button and flooding the room with the broadcast of _Middleton Nightly_.

A reporter holds her microphone out to a kid whose blond buffoonery and bewildered hold on a blue twig-thing strikes Drakken as familiar. ". . . took 'em down," he's saying as the sound loads a step or two behind the picture. "I mean, KP did most of it -"

KP. Drakken lets out a reflex moan. Those are his arch-enemy's initials.

"- but I guess she can't talk right now 'cuz she hasn't figured out how to slow down those speed-shoes yet."

 _Rookie mistake,_ Drakken thinks, smirking to himself.

And then he freezes, right there in a stand, the water droplets on his swimsuit turning to ice, he's sure of it. What the buffoon's holding in his big clumsy paw is an arm. An arm in shiny metallic blue, skinny as a supermodel's.

It can only belong to a Bebe.

Ohhhhhhhhhh.

The rest of the story almost isn't required, as far as Drakken is concerned - the buffoon was involved; that's explanation enough for plenty of goof-ups - and yet he finds himself morbidly drawn to that arm, hinged at the middle by that cutting-edge elbow joint he designed himself. Scientific curiosity wins over and Drakken hops from one squishy foot to another as he waits for the kid to finish talking.

"Well," the kid says, "all we had to do was mess with the machine -"

What machine?

" - and then all of them had their heads upside-down" -

All of them as in more than three?

" - and they're so obsessed with being perfect that they just, like, self-destructed." The buffoon fixes the camera with a stare too serious for his dull-witted face. "There's a lesson in there somewhere, kids."

 _Self-destructed._ Over an easily-fixable malfunction.

His poor Bebes.

Drakken grinds another "Doodles!" through his back molars. He should have predicted it, that Kim Possible would swoop in and stop the Bebes from whatever unpredictable acts they were set on performing.

Dense disappointment, with a meager drop of relief, droops in his chest.

The buffoon gives the arm a careless swing, as though it is nothing more than a golf club (Duff Killigan's the only one Drakken knows who holds those in high regard). A faultless blue hand rotates in place on the end. "Yeah, and then we just started bowlin' them over," he says.

Ah. Yes. Drakken snaps his fingers together. That was why he came here in the first place, to retrieve his bowling ball and the size-six shoes he had to buy because some bowling alleys didn't carry sizes that small. . .

Drakken raises the remote and gives it a definitive click off as he jerks his head away. He doesn't want to see any more of this.

"Who's ready to lose to the Bowling Master?" he calls back to his henchmen.

* * *

Bowling is a ball. No pun intended.

While the henchmen score many a strike through sheer might, it is Dr. Drakken's wily calculations that anoint him the King of Spares. (Rather a mundane title - but, hey. Kingship is kingship.)

Still, inside Drakken there isn't the victory that there should be. Drakken feels dull somehow, sullied, a windshield with the dead bugs gone but the splatters remaining.

It's a feeling that stays with him all the way home, as he files away his bowling ball and shoes. He's just closed the drawer closed when the landline rings insistently, nearly piercing Drakken's eardrum (a place where even the rowdiest of today's teens don't wear jewelry).

Drakken makes an erratic lunge for the phone. "Dr. Drakken's Secret Lair, Dr. Drakken speaking," he says.

"Just the guy I was hoping to talk to." The voice on the other end is polite and perky - and chills Drakken to the bone.

 _Speaking of today's teens. . ._

"Kim Possible!" Drakken squeezes the receiver so tightly he can hear the plastic crunching in his grip. "How did you get this number?"

She ignores him, as if he _isn't_ both her elder and at least the second-biggest threat to the free world. "What have you been up to lately, Drakken?" she says.

Drakken clenches the phone still tighter. "Not much. I've been on vacation. Why?"

This only appears to catch her off guard for a half-instant. "I thought you might want to know about your Bebes," Kim Possible says.

His collarbone itches; Drakken rolls a shoulder pad in a circle to scratch it. "Look, I know they exploded, all right? I saw it on the news. No need to rub it in!"

"Wasn't planning on it. I just wanted to know if you were in on their totally-whacked plan. They built this giant hideout that they called a 'hive' like they really think they're bees or something."

Of course. The hive mind and the colony programming. For lack of orders, that would be the thing they'd revert to.

"And there was this creepy factory inside," Kim Possible continues, "making more and more Bebes."

Duplicating. Yes, that's the next practicable step. Drakken feels a gleam of posthumous pride.

"They kidnapped Smash Mouth for no real reason."

"What's a Smash Mouth?" Drakken says. Sounds like something Carl Thompson used to threaten him with if he didn't fork over his lunch money.

"Only the hottest band _ever_ ," Kim Possible says.

She doesn't add, _No doy you wouldn't know them, Drakken._ She doesn't have to - the eye-roll is audible.

" _And_ they decided they needed a 'queen,' so they went out and kidnapped a girl in my class, too." Drakken can imagine Kim Possible tossing her hair around. "They picked the right one, as far I'm concerned."

She speaks with layers of stories buried beneath her words, layers that date perhaps back to prehistoric times, and Drakken's ears perk with intrigue. "Is she part robot?"

Kim Possible hisses, as if she can't afford enough mirth to shape a full laugh. "I wish. No, she's just one of those Queen Bee control-freaks who makes life miserable for everybody else. You know the type."

"Very well," Drakken says, not quite as drolly as he intended to. His thoughts are shuddering at the prospect of someone who _Kim Possible_ would label a control freak. "Why'd you even save her?"

"Same reason I'd save _you_ ," Kim Possible says.

Bother. How can she always make it so he can't even argue with her?

Drakken squirms against a lab coat that suddenly seems too tight, too full of tags and seams. "All right - you caught me. This was yet another of my brilliant bids for world domination."

This is patently untrue, Drakken knows, but since when does a megavillain owe his arch-nemesis honesty?

"Liar," Kim Possible says, and she doesn't even have the decency to sound accusatory about it. "You didn't have anything to do with that."

"How do you _know_?" Drakken grinds out.

"Because you _never_ would've stood back and let the Bebes take all the glory," Kim Possible says. "If it were your idea, you'd have been gloating from right smack in the middle of it. Not to mention you'd never let them choose a queen over you..."

Drakken's throttling the phone by now. "All right! So I didn't sic them on Middleton tonight! I _did_ rebuild them. But, as I _sa-aid_ , I've been on vacation, and the last time I saw them, they were standing deactivated in a closet."

"Any idea how they could've been reactivated?"

Does he have any idea? Puh. How about a solution, pieced together in less time than it takes to cook oatmeal?

"Indeed I do," Drakken says, dancing his fingers across the desktop. "It wasn't robbery, or they would have made off with my Grow Ray and my Doom Ticker, too. But I forgot my cell phone on vacation, see. I left it back at the lair, at a table approximately forty feet from the closet. Its antenna was pointed at a ninety-degree angle, adjacent to -"

"Drak-ken!" Kim Possible snaps.

And why, oh why, does she always have to rush him through a good boast? She, who has yet to even encounter trigonometry in her high-school curriculum?

Drakken condenses his findings as much as he can bear: "My cell phone transmitted massive amounts of energy over the past week. I guess it brought the Bebes back to life."

"You know, if it were anyone but you, Drakken, I wouldn't believe that."

Annoyance breaks a bottle over his head. "What is THAT supposed to m-"

A dial tone is his only response.

Drakken slams the phone back down on its base hard enough to bruise (if they had flesh) and then charges back to his own quarters, breathing through flared-out nostrils. He peels back a corner of the blackout shade, redundant over the pitch-darkness it covers at this hour.

Below Drakken, waves hurl themselves against the rocky cliffs as if they, too, are frustrated beyond belief. All he can see in the faint-starred sky he wants to gaze at are fragments of Bebes. The standing skeletons that were supposed to be attractive. The scattered, disembodied heads, too impersonal to even freeze into Shego's caustic smile. The arms, strong enough to punch through a sedan roof, now lying at forlorn angles around the buffoon.

Something sharp settles over Drakken, nipping him with the first guilt pangs he's felt since his last conversation with Mother. They were humanoid, in order to skewer his college chums' expectations, as well as to ignite the primal fear of Things That Are Almost Human But Not Quite. It was an asset that became a liability when human vengeance and jealousy snuck in. The only solution for rebuilding was to strip them of anything even remotely human, so that only the "oid" was left, and Drakken doesn't even know what the blazes that is!

The roar of the sea fades away, so that all Drakken can hear is the memory of his own voice. His own _cruel_ voice:

 _"I expect better from my lackeys."_

 _"Lackeys?" The Bebes' red eyes sparked - why did he not care?_

 _"Yes! Especially the robotic ones!"_

Really, it's all quite simple. They were angry at him. They'd turned on him. And he'd ripped the rebellion straight out of them, just like he'd always wanted to do with Shego and Kim Possible and the rest of the planet's population. All completely within the guidelines of mad science.

So why the feeling that he's starting to mildew?

 _Positive reinforcement worked for Commodore Puddles. Maybe it would have worked for the Bebes, too._

A fascinating hypothesis that he'll now never get the chance to test out. The scientist in Drakken aches.

If he hadn't pared away their identity, if they'd had a mission beyond looking perfect, they could have survived a simple case of cranium inversion. Drakken knows it in his partially-blackened heart.

The crashing of the tides brings him back, teasing him with its power, power he must have.

Drakken leans forward, plopping his elbows on the window frame and drifting far beyond the stars into the realm of the hypothetical. Someday soon, he will cook up another plan to take over the world. And when that plan is put into action, perhaps he will need a new breed of humanoids. He can almost picture them now - dressed in the same jumpsuits as the henchmen, eyes glowing green strobe lights, their careful craftsmanship testifying not just to perfectionism, but to time and effort and. . . compassion.

To be a lackey is to be part of the evil family, after all. Maybe, deep down, the Bebes needed the same things he does: to be appreciated and loved.

And to reign supreme over the planet.

 **~Because apparently I can't get enough foreshadowing. . . see ya next time! :)~**


	28. I'll Have a Blue Christmas Without You

**~I'm back, everybody! The last week or two have been crazy for me, but I finally managed to get this Christmas story done just in time for... Halloween. :P Oh, well, at least it's an update. Enjoy!~**

Who knew the North Pole could be this cozy?

Certainly not Dr. Drakken, not two hours ago when they were slogging through this tundra - uphill, uphill, how in the name of science could every direction manage to be uphill? Legs two blocks of suet that he was responsible for moving. Wind all but leaving bite marks on his cheeks. Hair like frozen moss failing to protect his stick-out ears. Only consolation being that he isn't cold-blooded.

Not that Drakken isn't proud of his viciousness, but the phrase "cold-blooded criminal" has never made any sense to him. Scientifically speaking, "cold-blooded" refers to an animal whose body temperature conforms to its surroundings, and no such animal possesses the prefrontal clarity necessary to knowingly commit a crime. The many criminals Drakken has rubbed elbows with are exclusively warm-blooded.

At any rate, he and the buffoon - _Ron_ , Drakken heard Kim Possible call him - found this little cave, dented into a rock wall, and Drakken kindled a fire, getting to demonstrate his superior pyre-ability. They were relatively warm, relatively safe, for the moment, and yet there was still the question of staying alive. People who lived far up north killed seals to eat their blubber and wear their skin - which sounded disgusting to Drakken.

Still, if it came down to a matter of survival. . . he and Ron had taken an oath to survive so they could carry on the legacy of Snowman Hank beyond his cancellation. Built a rather impressive replica of the wise old snowman and everything to cement their conviction.

That was when Drakken remembered the voice message he'd managed to leave for Shego. As often as she checked her phone, she could be on her way up here at any second!

(This thought was considerably more comforting than the seal blubber.)

Shego did show up - tracked by Kim Possible, the two of them duking it out, and in front of the Hank replica, no less! Tsk, tsk. Clearly they were farther behind than Drakken and Ron in learning that enmity could hibernate for the holidays, Drakken remembers thinking, and not even terribly smugly.

Drakken stepped in to defuse the situation by putting his arms around each of them and inviting them inside. They'd both stared, two gaping pairs of green eyes, as if he had been beamed down from one of Saturn's multitude of moons. Behind them stood what was possibly (heh-heh) Kim Possible's entire family.

Oh, right! They must have been cold! He'd gone numb with frostnip and glee, but not everyone was so conditioned.

Drakken scrambled off to retrieve blankets for them. He would give the first one to Shego, and she'd be so pleased. She'd feel the Christmas spirit and his care for her, and it would warm her heart the way Snowman Hank had warmed his.

Just for Christmas, of course.

He ushered them in, every bit the gracious host, and handed out the mugs of hot cocoa he'd prepared. The lonely garbage chute, lying tipped on its side in the subzero desert, began to represent the entire Drak Force One in his mind, and there would be no mourning its loss for the remainder of the year.

Drakken glances over at the happy knot of people gathered in this warm little cave. Ron, wearing a sock on his head for no real reason, hops around like a kangaroo, while Kim Possible watches him in amusement. The little twins sip their hot cocoa and whisper snickers to each other. James, for once, is within feet of himself without sneering. Ann, who _never_ sneers, holds James's hand in the soft glow of the fire, and it's so unbearably beautiful. "Nana" Possible eyes Drakken as if she's remembering something. Even Shego is barely managing to restrain a smile.

It is Christmas Eve. And everything is perfect.

They're all huddled together, as if for a Christmas Eve service. All they need now are a couple of hymnals to sing carols out of, and - oh, it's so beautiful! Drakken wipes a happy little tear from the corner of one eye.

For the first time in their year-plus as villain and crime-fighter, Drakken is able to look at Kim Possible without the urge to do something awful to her - charge her; throw her to a pit of man-eating alligators; maybe rip apart her stupid little fashionable jacket that, if Drakken had sold it, probably would have netted him more than enough to _buy_ his cutting-edge battery. The thoughts still bounce through his brain, but the needing, the wanting, doesn't claw up to acidify his digestive tract and leave an itch beneath the skin.

That last option sounds straight out of _Cinderella_ , anyway. Besides, malice feels too clunky a thing to be carrying around tonight, as if it can't fit into this snug cave. He left it outside with all the other ice.

Surely a Christmas truce isn't outside the realm of acceptable villain-behavior - and even if it _is_ , Dr. Drakken has always enjoyed playing the maverick.

Not to mention, he just shoved two very compatible teens under the mistletoe. . . all right, the parsley. Point being, it worked! Red-glossed lips touched a freckled cheek, and it was so right upon observation, Drakken wondered how it never occurred to him before.

And his laughter was not alone.

It is that feeling, that feeling of being a single link in a chain - maybe one of those keeping-out-villains chains that always thwarted him before he met the sidekick who could melt them - that energizes Drakken far beyond what caffeine can provide. He watched every year as the humans and humanized animals who were friends of Snowman Hank joined hands and twirled in one large, glorious circle, and he wondered how it felt to be them. Now he knows, and he jumps up, skipping the length of the cave, humming Snowman Hank's theme song to himself.

Now, if only his henchmen were here. Drakken sighs as the fire flickers and warms the air. They may simply be his paid subordinates, with IQs lower than the temperature in this cave, but they're part of the family, too.

And so is - _was_ \- someone else. Someone special and secret, seen only by him. And now Ron.

Drakken halts up against a rock wall, and his fingers cramp against its surface. Sir Fuzzymuffin, the world's most compliant, most understanding teddy bear! In his haste to evacuate, he left the frowning, unassuming little bear aboard the Drak Force One.

Which has since blown to bits.

Also his pajamas. Pajamas, however, can be replaced. . . unlike Sir Fuzzymuffin. He was carefully handcrafted by the singlemost soothing pair of hands, just a few days after Drakken learned his already-quirky face was going to be decorated with a scar, which had not done wonders for his self-image.

The light inside of Drakken flickers like that one bulb in the kitchen that he's not tall enough to replace. He forces the cramped fingers into a ball and gives the wall a halfhearted punch that doesn't even fire up his pain receptors.

 _Are you going to cry?_ a snide little voice inside Drakken asks, at odds with the cheer around him.

 _No!_ Drakken replies fiercely, though his eyes _do_ sting as though he's rubbed them after handling chili peppers. He can feel icy outlines on his face of previous tears - ones that must have spilled over sometime between crash landing, performing a hostage negotiation for the chicken leg, and nearly becoming a polar bear's midnight snack; ones that have gone unnoticed until now. _I'm just a little. . . choked up._

Of _course_ he gets choked up thinking about it! That bear was his constant companion, his soulmate (if teddies can be said to have souls), and the work of his mother's hands. Imagining it - _him_ \- blowing apart in the explosion only compounds Drakken's guilt for all the barefaced lies he's told her and all the times he missed her birthday.

Drakken can picture Mother now, crafting the bear out of devotion and delusion, squinting from behind her slanting glasses at the stitches, so determined to make every last one perfect. . .

She succeeded, as far as he's concerned. Though Sir Fuzzymuffin wears - _wore_ \- Drakken's constant bristly expression and his odd features, he doesn't - _didn't_ \- look like something from the poster of _Revenge of the Bloodsucking Bears, Part XIV_.

It was the tradition every Christmas Eve: Dr. Drakken, Sir Fuzzymuffin at his side, and Snowman Hank larger than life on the television screen. This year, Drakken set it to record, fully expecting to watch it tomorrow inside the opulent walls of his newly-won palace.

All of those ingredients have now been knocked far outside his grasp. And Christmas Eve must really do something to a villain's psyche, because it's not the palace Drakken is grieving.

Drakken's fingers trace the scar tissue, self-conscious in its wide outward swing. Imagining Sir Fuzzymuffin's softer, knitted one exploding in a spray of stuffing and stitching seems to slit the poorly-healed wound back open again.

It hurts, in other words.

And Christmas Eve isn't _supposed_ to to hurt! It obviously doesn't hurt any of the people still chattering to each other, sharing stories and spots in front of the fireplace, and for the first time in over two decades, Drakken can't find it in himself to ruin it for them.

He's still stewing over that when someone says, "What's up, Doc?"

It isn't Bugs Bunny (who would rank far below Snowman Hank on Drakken's list of Cartoon Characters I Want To Meet, anyway). It's Shego.

Her curving hair catches the firelight and bounces it back around the cave. Her chilled beauty seems lighter, softer somehow, just for tonight. Come tomorrow, she'll probably be all angles and plasma and sarcasm again.

"Only you could switch from global domination to a Christmas bash this fast," Shego says.

Ordinarily, it would seem an insult, and yet it is less weighty than her ordinary words, drifting over Drakken like gentle snow flurries. Drakken feels his chest hefting up. It's a welcome change from the hands clasped at his sides, itching to skim across that fur one last time - that fur the color of a good fresh potato, that fur every bit as lush as Jack Hench's professionally-laundered couches. . .

For an instant the atmosphere, emptied of any old hostilities, and the company around him almost loosen Drakken's tongue enough to share his one woe with his sidekick. Shego has no knowledge of Sir Fuzzymuffin, though, and Drakken would prefer to keep it that way. Her disdain may have been toned down for the holiday, but one word about the teddy bear he cuddles with at night and that gentle flurry will evolve into a blizzard rivaling the spitting sky outside. And he couldn't bear it.

In spite of the demise of his furry friend, Drakken chuckles a private chuckle. _Bear_ it.

Whatever's happening must show on his face, and Shego notices. The black-painted corners of her mouth twitch. "What's the matter? Santa didn't come to the rescue after your crash-landing?"

Drakken's hands stab to his hips. In her eagerness to "slam" him (as the teens today say), she forgot one very crucial piece of information!

"Oh, come now, Shego. Everyone knows Santa's not at the North Pole on Christmas Eve." Drakken can hear his voice inflating - not rising in pitch, just swelling in timbre. "He's out delivering presents. Du-uh!"

Shego spatters a guffaw, which Drakken drowns out with his own righteous sniff. All right, so Santa Claus is _probably_ a mythical figure. Drakken's scientist enough to know the man would need unprecedented technology to make a world-round trip in one night, not to mention consume all those cookies.

Still, every Christmas story is magical/miraculous/scientifically unlikely. Once a year, he can handle it.

And there's also the matter of this handy little cave, conveniently hollowed into the dead-gray rocks, stocked with firewood, decorations, instant-hot-cocoa packets, and the ingredients for cupcakes. It was as if it had been simply standing there _waiting_ for wayward Christmas Eve travelers to seek its shelter. And who stockpiled all of that for them? Arctic squirrels?

(Definitely not penguins. They're at the _South_ Pole. Most people don't know that.)

Drakken gazes happily around the cave. Everyone else seems to be enjoying snuggling deep into their blankets, sipping their cocoa, and leaning back lazily - how _can_ they, it's Christmas Eve?! But Ron's joy is as bright and happy as ever.

As Drakken's own is now. Yes, the sadness for Sir Fuzzymuffin is there, and it remains significant. But the _ratio_ of happiness to sadness flares larger than almost any dating past his second-grade year.

Why did he ever try to hate Christmas?

A snippet from _The Nutcracker_ ballet plays inside Drakken's head, and he rises up on one toe to attempt the accompanying spin. Unsuccessfully, as it turns out, landing him up against one rock wall, still on tiptoe.

"What was _that_?" Shego says.

"I don't know," Drakken answers - quite cheerily. "Ohhhh, Shego, isn't it just all so - grand?" He gives her his complete smile, the one he always strives to keep buckled into a smirk around Kim Possible.

Shego returns it with her healthy deadpan grin. "'Grand'? What happened to Little Mr. Bah-Humbug?"

"If you're referring to me, he found a cozy little cave before he died of hypothermia," Drakken says. (Oooh, such a wonderful retort! He'd give himself many points for that.)

Before he can follow up with a comment that if she's referring to Ebeneezer Scrooge, she needs to read the book, Shego snorts. "How could anyone even tell if you had hypothermia?"

Drakken doesn't dignify _that_ with any retort, save for another sniff. Hypothermia produces plenty of other symptoms in addition to bluish skin. There's drowsiness, disorientation, delirium. . .

And, you know what, he doesn't want to think about that right now. Not when it's hot cocoa time!

Fingers wrapped around a mug of hot chocolate, Drakken sips and feels the warmth all the way down his throat into his stomach. Some seeps back up to his chest. Not acid reflux. Pleasant warmth.

It is a newish sensation for Drakken. Passionate evil is ferocious heat in the veins. Indifferent evil is cold enough to freeze nitrogen. Both of them have been thoroughly satisfying until he was graced with this warmth.

It is an air pocket under the fall of an avalanche, allowing him to continue breathing.

Drakken rubs at the stitch in his side, where the sting of tonight's failure has already receded. No, it wasn't a failure - simply an exercise in learning. With further experience tucked among his already-significant brainpower he'll be able to more on and become a more capable villain as the new year arrives.

The thought snuffs out the air pocket and leaves Drakken somehow winded.

Perhaps that's why he didn't go search for Santa's workshop earlier. He might have been afraid it wouldn't be there.

Also, there were polar bears out there.

While Drakken is frowning in puzzlement, Ron drops as though made of rubber into the seat beside him. His fellow crash refugee is still sporting the sock that gives new meaning to the term _stocking cap_ , Drakken thinks, chuckling to himself again. "Say, Dr. D," Ron says.

Drakken surprisingly likes how his nickname sounds coming out of this kid. It has a friendly beat to it, like he's about to break into an especially catchy musical number. "Say, Ron."

"I just wanted to say thanks for, ya know, saving me from that polar bear," Ron says.

Did he do that? Drakken remembers nothing beyond a smear of terror, a rush of pumping legs, a spike of adrenaline, and then suddenly Ron's hand in his as they bolted to safety.

"Just wanted to letcha know I appreciate it," Ron continues. "Especially after I ruined your Christmas-conquest plans."

Drakken concentrates very hard on blowing across the rim of his cocoa mug.

"Yeah, thanks," comes a squeak from Ron's khaki pocket. Drakken's surprised the little naked. . . rat. . . thing _hasn't_ frozen by now, considering he has even less body hair than Drakken's been blessed with.

"Don't mention it," Drakken says. His lip curls; his thoughts brace. " _Ever_. Any of it, understand? I have a reputation to maintain!"

Drakken waits for the spaces between Ron's freckles to harden, as they tried, to poor effect, to do earlier in the evening aboard the Drak Force One. Instead, they fold as if he's about to laugh and then sober. "My lips are zipped, dude," the kid says.

There's a degree of earnestness, although Drakken isn't sure whether or not it's genuine. Young people can fake it pretty well these days, even one as clownish as this child. At least if Ron tries to blab to anyone about the bedtime sequence, Drakken can now truthfully deny Sir Fuzzymuffin's existence.

Rising from the chair and setting his mug aside, Drakken crouches by the fire to warm his hands - and his face - and his body - sheesh, it's _cold_ again. His knees creak a little, the first reminder Drakken's had all night that he's not the gleeful seven-year-old his spirit has rewound to.

Still, he's not about to let anything spoil this Christmas Eve. Just bring him a cushion, and he'll be perfect!

Except. . . oh yes, they're in a cave.

With a distinct lack of cushions.

Santa let them down on that front.

Ah, well. Maybe he determines age by measuring Christmas spirit.

Drakken slants farther back in his seat, fingers doing the can-can on the armrests. He's receiving mixed bio-messages about whether or not he's glad he saved Ron - chest itchy but warm, teeth clenched but neck hairs lying flat as though in slumber. At any rate, he's sorry that he had to be rude to him on a day - or night - like Christmas Eve.

Snowman Hank, Drakken knows, would approve of his knee-jerk rescue; it fits perfectly with his "put away your petty problems and embrace your fellow man" philosophy. And that leaves Drakken all confuzzled (which is when you're so confused that you can't spell _confused_ ), since Snowman Hank is no expert villain. Jack Hench and the evil pundits would no doubt cry foul over the fact that, after decades spent mastering the craft, Dr. Drakken can still make a rookie mistake because he has instincts closer to those of his pet poodle than those of his pet sharks.

Well, phooey on them! Drakken defiantly slurps the last drop of his cocoa. For today - tonight - tomorrow - mngh, whenever! - he's going to have himself a well-deserved respite from villainy.

 _Much as I enjoy it,_ Drakken hastily reminds himself.

Everyone, no matter how much they love their jobs, takes Christmas off. He's simply indulging in some nearness, some bonding, some lack of stress. _Ahhhhh_. Can world domination really grant him anything more wonderful than this?

Drakken startles at the traitorous thought and then waves it off with a shake of his ponytail. He'll think about that later.

Right now, he's warm and content with the reminder of Snowman Hank's pearls of wisdom.

Drakken snuggles down into his patched-up blanket, shoving his shoulder as close to Shego's as it can get without being weird. (She's even less crazy about being hugged and nuzzled than he is.) The fire is roaring, the lingering taste of hot cocoa is magnificent in his mouth, and people who were once enemies are smiling at him like they could even possibly be friends.

Besides Sir Fuzzymuffin's demise, there's only one bump in the road.

The knowledge that all of this has to be temporary.

The cocoa turns lukewarm in Drakken's stomach. Perhaps it's better to think about poor Sir Fuzzymuffin after all.

Especially when Drakken consoles himself with the almost-certainty that the fuzzy little soul exists and is in Teddy Bear Heaven right now. Sir Fuzzymuffin was a good, faithful teddy bear, and surely no one could find it in their hearts to hold his owner's crimes against him.

Still, Drakken can't help but wish the _polar_ bear had been the bear to explode. Not with him the vicinity, though. That would be quite grisly, which is another type of bear altogether. . .

His thoughts are locked in an endless game of pinball, bounding off the walls of his head, hitting obstacles, racking up points without really getting anywhere. When Ron breaks in, Drakken's almost grateful for the interruption.

Until he realizes the kid has said, "So - Shego - what would you do if I shoved you and Drakken under the mistletoe?" and then Drakken feels his cheeks blaze as if touched with fireplace cinders.

Shego snaps Ron a murderous look without missing a beat. "That parsley would die a sudden horrible death. And you'd be next," she says.

Drakken laughs nervously. "She's joking. . ."

"I'm not joking." Shego talks over Drakken, before he's even finished speaking.

Ron flashes them a smile that doesn't quite stick in place. "Gotcha." He nods toward Drakken's empty cocoa mug. "Can I getcha a refill?"

"Yes, thank you!" The words boom from the nicest sector of Drakken's throat, to make up for his earlier brusqueness, and then fall into song as naturally as he takes his next breath. "So put away those petty problems..."

"And embrace your fellow maaaaaaan!" Ron adds from the pot of cocoa next to the tree.

Drakken grins to himself. If he's not mistaken, they're actually matching the natural tempo of the whistling wind outside. It's been a long time, maybe his whole entire life, even, since anyone sang harmony with him.

A strange new thought suction-cups itself to Drakken's brain.

 _Snowman Hank says bad guys can turn good._

It is a spell. It is an invitation to Santa's workshop. It is a key that will escort him into a fantasy land where sugarplums grow on trees.

And, like all other things magic, it will stop working once Christmas is over and gone.

* * *

Yes, as a matter of fact, he _does_ want the celebration to be as drawn-out as possible.

Drakken tosses aside the Drak Force One scheme, only _partially_ because said ship has been obliterated, and goes home to see his mother the next day. In his eagerness to wear the crown, he forgot that Mother really has no one else to come home for Christmas. He could kick himself - not literally; leg muscles don't bend in that fashion - for almost letting her spend it alone.

Because Snowman Hank was right. Christmas _is_ a feeling - a feeling of safety and serenity and peace that Drakken rarely gets the chance to experience. The world is a friendly, submissive place that doesn't need a dictator to whip it into shape.

Not right now.

And even if the lights, the cookies, and the presents aren't the _point_ , they're certainly not downsides. When Drakken lands in his old driveway, Mother's modest little house is decorated with at least five different strings of lights, and the slender Christmas tree in the living room drips with her delicate white glass balls. ( _Delicate_ being a poetic way of saying they'll break if Drakken tries to handle one.)

Drakken actually traveled to the soap-and-perfume shop and bought his mother a set of "bath salts," which honestly smell more of various flowers than of sodium chloride. But Mother adores flowers, and she bursts out with a watery squeal when she opens the package. The bulbs in the room seem to brighten another fifty watts, as if the fuse box is voice-activated. Now _that_ would be some wonderful tech. . .

He helps himself to some of Mother's cookies, better than any store's, and surrenders himself to one of her back rubs, better than any chiropractor's. As he chews, he tells her, employing as much truth as he can, about the ship - though in this version, its parts were all bought legally, and it was a satellite launched to broadcast his radio talk show worldwide - and the explosion/crash he was lucky to survive. Mother breathes a prayer at that part, and Drakken says one of his own, that she never thinks to question his stories.

Fine. His _lies_.

(Which aren't very Christmassy, but breaking her heart would be even less so.)

Upon learning of Sir Fuzzymuffin's sad fate, Mother lets her eyes droop to meet the smooth, pale skin underneath them, so different from Drakken's untidy black bags. She expresses her condolences and then insists, with no argument on his part, on rolling out his presents.

There's a paperback sci-fi novel that the library hasn't acquired yet. A thick-lined coloring book that will go quite nicely with the ninety-six crayon-pack he received for his birthday. A homemade coupon for a free foot massage. A plaid wood sweater that is simply marvelous against his goose bumps - Mother must have had to turn down the thermostat this month in order to pay the electric bill. And there's a new pair of backup gloves to replace the ones that were acid-eaten last year. (It was _hard_ to come up with a story for _that_ one.)

Drakken thanks her multiple times.

Many days later, as Christmas is fading away and New Year's preparations try to take its place, another package arrives in the mail for Drakken. He knows he's visibly blushing as he signs for the package addressed to "Drewbie Lipsky" from "Mama."

But as soon as the UPS man - who was entirely too amused for his own good, Drakken thought - leaves, Drakken rips into it as earnestly as - well, as when he was seven. Drakken paws aside the bubble wrap and the Styrofoam packing peanuts, both almost good enough to be presents in their own right, and gasps out loud when he sees what lies beneath them.

He is staring into a scale model of his own face, spread out across brown fur - _burnt sienna_ is the closest match in his crayon-pack - and distinguished by a large squishy nose nothing like Drakken's. Other than that, the resemblance is uncanny. The thing has a gruff unibrow, a nasty scar, a pugnacious lower lip. . .and an overall kindly look.

Drakken can almost hear Snowman Hank's unrivaled chuckle, telling him again that _bad guys can turn good_.

He closes his eyes and makes a vow to himself. He _will_ become a good guy, once he has gotten what he wants - needs - deserves. After he has conquered the world, he will never be caught breaking another law again.

There is something itchy surging through that thought, like a lab coat whose seams need to be broken in, but Drakken doesn't have the time to dissect it and run it under his mental microscope now. There's a whole new year stretching out in front of him: opening up his bag of freak. Conquering the world. Crusading to get Snowman Hank back on TV - surely, some TV executive must have a kid he can hold for ransom or something.

Maybe, _maybe_ he'll even be able to win his enemies over without destroying them. Then Christmas will never have to end, ever.

Drakken lifts the bear's arm and curls his hand around its soft little paw. "Well," he says, booming even in a whisper, "here's to a new year. . . Sir Fuzzymuffin the Second."


	29. Give It a Go

**~Part 4 (of 4) of Shego's origin story. In which I attempt to answer the age-old question: Why Drakken?  
**

 **Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! :D~**

 _Okay, so this is getting monotonous._

And Shego had never done monotony well.

For the past couple days, it had been as predictable as a sitcom: show up at a villain's lair to interview. Demonstrate qualifications. Get hit on. Get mistaken for a secretary. Get disregarded. Even meting out the well-deserved tail-kickings was becoming way too routine.

Shego pulled back HenchCo's magazine to peer closer at the ad in the dim hotel lights. _Dr. Drakken, notorious mad scientist, seeks sidekick and/or bodyguard to help him with his ultimate goal of world domination!_

 _Dr. Drakken._ Far as supervillain names went, that was actually kinda nicely ominous. At least it wasn't your standard Go City I-can-guess-your-schtick-without-even-looking-at-you. He lived on a "haunted" island in the Caribbean.

Housekeeping would be here in an hour, but Shego went ahead and yanked the sheets back up and tucked them into the corners of the mattress just to have SOMETHING to do with her hands besides ignite them.

If this didn't work out. . . she didn't even wanna think about it.

Sure, she was still in contact with HenchCo, who were either not smart enough to figure out that she'd been the one to make off with their absentee helicopter or too desperate for a decent client to care. Hench was still oozing slimy encouragement, telling her that "all was not lost" - as if he were Shakespeare or something. That there was a villain seminar coming up, and surely she would catch somebody's eye there.

That was exactly what Shego was afraid of. Why would she have wanted to attend a how-to on stuff she already knew inside and out just to be in the company of a bunch of creepos? And why would she want to be stuck to Hench's imported-leather soles like a wad of gum for the rest of her career?

Shego snagged her key card and slipped it into her leg pouch, which you'd need to have kamikaze instincts to even _approach_. At the door, she stopped and turned back to give the room one last, lip-curled look. With any luck, she'd have a job by tonight, have some money coming in, maybe be able to rent one of those cute little apartments she'd always wanted.

 _Nah, strike that - I'll get that cute little apartment no matter what._ Shego's feet slapped down the hall, out the door, and across the parking lot in their own miniature catfights. _Even if I have to rob a bank_ myself _._

Her oldest brother's head-wag of disapproval popped into Shego's brain as clearly as the pictures on the jumbo-screen in Go Tower that had been one of his lamer ideas. _Shego, I thought I raised you better than that,_ she could almost hear him saying - with the sadness that always turned her stomach into a pickle jar.

But now Shego grinned to herself as she climbed into the pilot's seat. All of Hego's mom-and-dad-and-apple-pie-even-though-we-don't-get-any-of-the-above ideals had laid down a pretty solid framework, all right. The perfect mold for creating a villain.

Shego had always loved irony.

And she'd always wanted to visit the Caribbean.

* * *

Dr. Drakken's "haunted" island turned out to be about the size of Go City High, but you couldn't miss the boxy shape of his lair, popping in silhouette like an amped-up version of some little boy's pillow fort. Shego had tripped over a few too many of those in her growing-up years.

Even at that, Shego's heart _still_ jumped, ever so slightly, as the lair towered into focus. It was immense and menacingly dark, with only a few bright windows peeking out. And, of course, the whole thing stood over a sheer cliff that led straight down into a roiling ocean. If there _were_ such a thing as ghosts, this would be the type of place where they hung out.

Shego liked this guy's style already.

And the fact that he had a more-or-less-paved runway carved into the grungy sand that ran parallel to the building. Shego eased the helicopter to a stop on it, cut the engine, and inspected her hair in the glass door while she worked on settling her expression like cement.

She had no idea what she was about to get herself into. Not that she couldn't find her way _out_ if it came to that. But - _dang_ \- she hoped it wouldn't.

Then again, she'd been stupid enough to hope before.

Shego swung herself out the door and strolled around the building, looking for a way in. The place was studded with tons of doors - most of them knob-free and bolted into the wall, easy for an untrained eye to skip over - not to mention skylights and air ducts. She was about to just give up and pick an entry point at random when she tripped over a stiff straw welcome mat that'd been defaced to read, YOU'RE NOT WELCOME. GO AWAY.

 _A little immature. But I can appreciate the sentiment._

Shego slowly lifted her head and found herself staring straight at a roundish object with a long raised slit in the middle stuck to the wall. It looked more like a dragon's eyeball than a doorbell, as far as Shego was concerned. She rang it anyway and followed it up with a knock.

Some Mozart-wannabe notes trilled out of the eyeball. That was followed by a clamber and a thud from inside.

 _Well, THAT sounds promising._

"Who's there?" a man called on the other side of the door.

It suddenly seemed like the stupidest question in the world, and Shego couldn't handle another moron. When her "Pixie Scouts" came out ripe with sarcasm, she could have passed out in relief.

Footsteps pounded toward the door. The knob was fumbled, and then the door swung open.

The guy who answered the door was medium-sized and baby-faced, nobody she would've given a second look - if it weren't for the sunny-sky-blue of his skin.

Shego's jaw wasn't even tempted to drop. Half the people she knew looked like they all belonged in a box of crayons, too.

With his gaze glassy and faraway, his spiky black ponytail boasting a DIY haircut, and the oversize lab goggles resting on top of his head, the man appeared every inch the mad scientist. Definitely not the too-neat Dementor.

And right now, that 'do was cocked to one side, studying her. "Where's your beret?" he said.

Shego felt herself blink. "What?"

"And aren't you a little old to be a Pixie Scout?"

He was so not serious.

But the straight, expectant line of his body told Shego he was. She facepalmed, and a groan slipped out.

"Not that you look old, ma'am!" the man blurted. He sounded so apologetic, Shego spread her fingers to find his flailing at the air. _Social outcast_ was practically printed on his smooth forehead.

"Whoa. Whoa. Whoa. Stop." Shego held both hands up like roadblocks. "Relax. I'm _not_ a Pixie Scout. That was sarcasm."

She seriously thought the guy was going to melt into a puddle. "Are you Dr. Drakken?" she added.

He gave her a suspicious squint. "Who wants to know?" he growled.

Shego couldn't resist an eye-roll this time. "I do." She pulled the magazine from under her arm and flipped it open, jabbing a finger at the ad she'd circled. "I'm answering his ad."

To Shego's surprise, the man broke into a smile so wide and bright it could've blinded you. If there'd been even a trace of malice lurking behind it, he would've had the Joker-thing down pat. As it was, she wouldn't have pegged him as a supervillain at all, despite the getup.

"Yep, that's me," the man said, sticking out a hand that was strangely small for the size of his arms. "Come on in, Miss. . ."

His big dark eyes stayed on her face, didn't roam the length of her figure.

Shego let herself exhale. "Shego," she said, accepting his hand. "Just call me Shego."

"Right! Well!" Dr. Drakken pulled back from the shake and bowed low in the creepy doorway. "Certainly, come in, make yourself at home. . ." _Now_ the grin turned a shade of menacing to match the surroundings. "Welcome to my evil lair."

For such a lanky-looking guy, he had a heck of a gravel voice. One Shego hadn't really noticed when he was being a doof about Pixie Scouts. He could raise goose bumps on some do-gooders with that alone.

Drakken squeezed away from the door to let her step inside. Shego's boot had just crossed the unwelcome mat when Hego seemed to plant his big dopey self right into her path, hands rammed on his hips.

 _Stop right there, sister!_ he would've been exclaiming right about now - or something similar. Something all drama-with-cheese. _How many times have I told you never to enter a supervillain's lair without backup? Yes, even now that you're seeking evil employment! You don't know this man! Who knows what -_

Shego marched straight through his memory and slammed the door shut on it. For a second, all she could see was Dr. Drakken standing beside her, balancing his weight on a foot that also looked weirdly tiny, arms thrown out so that he resembled some Broadway actor. Then her eyes adjusted enough to the lack of light that she could see the color scheme wasn't pitch-black after all - it was maroon, dark as dried blood, somehow that much scarier and more professional.

The floors might've had a shine once upon a time. Now they were cloudy and gurgling with green slime that raced under in tanks underneath them. Drakken picked his way expertly over them, still grinning, sweeping his arm out with a cry of "BEHOLD!"

Stark shadows climbed the walls, all of them dwarfing the mad scientist who stood smugly inside them. At the other end of the room, a door split jaggedly in half to show off a vaguely lit stone hallway that no one had bothered to smother in carpet.

It may have been the first time since preschool that Shego had felt at home.

He definitely had plenty of weapons on his hands. There was a wicked-looking doohickey lurking in every room they passed through. Most of them were in various stages of assembly - or just plain broken - but even then, you couldn't miss their touch-me-and-die potential.

Shego was already sold in that department. She got busy on keeping that from showing.

Dr. Drakken's face, on the other hand, was wide-open and readable even in the half-light. Shego picked up every tic jumping in his mega-chin, every hint of ruthlessness that curved his mouth - and every surge of excitement that washed all of it away and left him the spitting image of a puppy who'd just been let out of his crate for the first time all day.

Drakken ushered her into one of the labyrinth of rooms and gestured wildly to a half-formed arrangement of metal that reminded Shego of a paper doll on steroids. "This one I'm _especially_ proud of. Behoooollllldd -" he drawled about six syllables too many into the word - "the Indestructisuit!"

Shego took a moment to snip the snipe out of her voice and then said, "Body armor?"

The smooth cheeks sagged under the black circles too old for them. "Well, _yes_ , I suppose. If you want to refer to it in such mundane terms," Drakken said. "Once construction of the Indestructisuit is complete, I will be impervious to anything - bullets, acid, tranquilizers - you name it, it can't hurt me!"

"Did you get that idea from Iron Man?" _Don't smirk. DON'T smirk._

"Perhaps." Drakken wiped his hands on the fabric of his lab coat. The thing was already so splotched with chemical stains and creased into I-slept-in-this wrinkles that it would've been pretty hard to dirty it further. "Rest assured, however, this is all patented Dr. Drakken technology. Thing is, I've been having a devil of a time finding enough metal to complete construction."

Did he just say _devil_ of a time?

Shego ironed her next words flat before she said them - "Could you maybe use some of the metal from rays and stuff that, uh, didn't work out?" It was risky, but the guy had the hunched back of someone who was pretty tight with failure.

Drakken stunned her with a smile. His big eyes were a lot more genial than the grim eyebrow suggested. "Excellent idea; very good, Shego! The problem there is that most my old Doomsday devices aren't made of indestructible materials - otherwise, why would they have broken in the first place? And once they're _gone_ " - he sniffled as if he were mourning a pet hamster - "there's not usually a lot that's salvageable."

"Makes sense," Shego said.

"Ah, but fear not, Shego!" Drakken bounced his left index finger off his right and then swung it up to tap his temple. "I, Dr. Drakken, am far too much of a genius to be bested by a quandary like this!"

 _Phew. I was getting a little worried there._

Drakken stretched his fingertips out about three inches from her own, and then danced them playfully back to his side in a wave. Shego followed him to the room next door, where an enormous silver-washed magnet was suspended from the floor in an observatory-style seat, its prongs poking defiantly out of an open skylight.

"This - " Drakken poked his chest out like he thought he was Rambo or somebody - "is the Magnet of Malice. It can collect any unused metal in a three-hundred-mile radius."

"How does it know the metal's not being used?" Shego asked.

"Oh, it doesn't." Drakken winked at her. It was probably supposed to be suave. Came across more as though he'd pepper-sprayed himself. "But once it's in the Magnet of Malice's clutch, they certainly won't be using it any longer, _will they_? So far I've collected so many trash bins and golf clubs, and the other day I even snagged a government satellite! _That_ could come in handy!"

He wasn't playful anymore. The shadowy possibilities that fell across his face ran dark and deep. They buzzed a thrill through Shego.

"No kidding," she said.

"If only I could figure out what to do with it. . ." The shadow scattered, and Drakken shrugged the clearly-padded shoulders so that they nearly reached his protruding ears. "I have so many options and can't think of a blasted thing!"

Ah. Yeah. The whole too-good-to-be-true clause. Shego tried to keep her sighing to a minimum.

Made easier by the fact that she didn't see a lick of surrender in Dr. Drakken. The dude took to pacing as if he were having espresso wired into his veins. A guy this determined - she could throw him a bone.

"Have you ever thought about mind control?" Shego suggested.

Drakken's head snapped up and gave her an I'm-impressed nod. "Brilliant, brilliant idea!" he crowed. His head slumped down to meet his collarbone. "Unfortunately, I have yet to perfect a mind-control device."

"But!" The head shot back up again. How in the world did he not have whiplash? "I have been devising a signal that will knock out every cell phone on the planet!"

Shego had to grin. Nah, it wouldn't win them world domination, but the annoyance factor was far enough up there to be worth it.

Drakken returned it with one his own - which looked like it didn't know how it had gotten there or where it was going next. Shego sucked in a heap of air so she could ask the no-doy thing without snarking. "Do _you_ have a cell phone?"

"Yes, of course, I have a cell phone. _Every_ one has a cell phone these days. . . " Drakken waved at her, but his hand froze in mid-dismiss. The glaze that had fallen over his entire body visibly cleared into a focus. "Ahhh. . . yes. I should wire mine to be immune, shouldn't I?"

Shego shrugged. "If that's how it works, then, yeah."

Drakken blinked, then cricked his neck with a sound that was also older than his face looked. He also ran a hand over the wild spikes as if to tame them, but to no avail. Shego had a feeling they had a mind all their own. "Yes! I'll get right to that! I'll do yours, too, if you'll remind me," he added.

As an afterthought. Still felt good, though.

"Oh, but you haven't seen the best part yet!" Drakken cried. He'd reached a level of glowing that'd put professional tour guides to same. "Step into my office. I believe you'll find it quite impressive."

The end of his sentence curled up in expectation. Shego let him show her down the remainder of the hall and prepared herself for the worst as he flung open a scabbed-up door. His "behold!" went way quicker this time.

Well, with her expectations in a ditch, the place couldn't help but surpass 'em. Not exactly spick-and-span. Everything across his desk - from the spill of papers, to the empty, tipped-over glass flaked at the bottom with crusting milk - stopped just short of sloppy. There was something more easygoing, almost-cozy about it.

Or woulda been, if it weren't for the algae-green that glowed between every crack in the wood flooring. And the signs of wacko experiments everywhere - here a battery part bigger than Hego's entire CAR, there a haphazardly-thrown pair of safety goggles. Some satisfyingly deadly-looking chemical concoction bubbled in the curvy links of a doodad straight out of Honors Chemistry. Shego just hoped those flailing elbows wouldn't send it flying. This was a pretty nice lair, and she'd hate to see it burn to the ground before she even _got_ the job.

Drakken sank into a chair in front of the almost-slop on his desk. He looked taller in it somehow, even though the handles extended ridiculously high toward the ceiling and then curved into devil horns at the very top. The corners of his mouth curved to match it, and the goofy mist evaporated from his face.

"This room is second only to my lab," Drakken announced. "And I'm very - err, wait, nnggh. Grrk! Um, should I have offered you something to drink when I saw you in? We have milk, lemonade, iced tea, and - err - water - "

Shego barely withheld a snort. "I don't suppose you have stuff for martinis?"

The curve fell into an O, and Shego let out a much-needed burst of laughter. "I'm teasing."

"Oh, come now, Shego." Drakken shot her a look that had _are-you-even-of-age?_ written at its edges, but the sparkle was back in his eyes as he pretended to chide her with his finger. "Pixie Scouts aren't allowed to drink on duty."

Shego didn't answer that. She just noticed that her muscles were drifting closer to relaxed than they had been in weeks.

"Water's fine," Shego said. Just _listening_ to the guy yak was scraping her throat.

Drakken hopped out of his horned chair and down the hall the opposite direction, toward what Shego guessed was the kitchen. There were sounds of chaos and ice being dropped, followed by a gravel-shout of, "Ohhhh, Snapdoodles!"

Shego bit the inside of her cheek. The dude swore like an eighty-five-year old woman.

Drakken finally made it back into his "office" - hopping on one foot - and slid an almost-overflowing glass of water across the desk to Shego. She picked it up and eyed him over the rim. This was the part where she took charge.

And she'd better do it fast. She was almost starting to hope.

"Okay, before we get started, _I_ have a couple questions to ask _you_." Shego leveled her gaze at Drakken until he nodded, blinking at full speed. "First of all - do you expect me to be your secretary?"

Drakken's brow went into wedges. "Why on Earth would I need a secretary?"

Shego glanced over at the about-as-tidy-as-the-Wegos'-sock-drawer snarl of papers on his desk, and something sarcastic nipped at her tongue. She held it back, though. This Drakken guy seemed pretty decent and definitely DIDN'T seem like a chauvinist, so she wasn't about to let him have it with both barrels.

Yet.

"Okay, number two: do you expect me to help with the housework?"

Drakken frowned even deeper. "To a degree. I mean, when you can. We all pitch in around here, I and all of the henchmen, so you'd be no different."

Well, it wasn't the answer she'd been hoping for. But at least it wasn't a gender issue.

"Third - those things under the floor? Yeah, I need to know what they are."

Drakken straightened his posture and curled another grin her way. "Those are shark tanks. For the quick and handy disposal of my enemies."

There was something borderline-vicious in the way he said it. A nice surprise.

"And number four: if I asked for a demonstration of those tanks or any of these weapons, would you use them on me?" A picture of Duff Killigan exploded into her mind like one of his stupid little golf balls, and Shego ground her teeth down hard.

Everything on Drakken did a full hike toward his hairline. "Absolutely not!" he cried - with a dainty little gasp. "Even supervillains have _some_ standards! Why would I do that to a potential employee? Especially a lady."

THERE it was. Shego gritted down harder.

Before she could lash a word at him, though, Drakken's eyes were already cringing. "Ngggh. Should I not have said that?" he said. The fingertips began their dance again. "Are you Woman's Lib? That's good, good, not a problem! But my mother _did_ raise me to be a gentleman."

It was so totally dorky, it was almost charming. Shego felt only the corners of her lips twitch upward.

Shego slanted back against the wood. "Okay then. I guess that'll do for now."

"Wonderful!" Drakken said. Head-bob. "Now. . . I'd like to proceed, if I may."

"Knock yourself out."

"Thank you. Um. . . what are your qualifications?" Drakken massaged his wrists as if _he_ were the one here for a job interview.

"I'm taking college by correspondence." Shego straightened her spine so that it matched the chair's. "I don't have my degree yet, if that's what you mean."

For an instant, Drakken froze as if she'd just dropped an ice cube down his shirt. The laugh that finally spewed from him was like that truck engine that some show-off just _had_ to throttle at every red light. "Pshaw, who needs a degree?" he said. "It's not indicative of your intelligence at all!"

Huh. Not what she would've expected from someone as I'd-be-right-at-home-in-a-pocket-protector as this guy.

"Now, errr, gnn, which position are you applying for? Sidekick or bodyguard?" Drakken said.

See, that was probably the question he shoulda asked FIRST. There was no sign of Dementor's finesse.

Shego considered that for a second. She didn't know exactly what a "sidekick" did, but it had to be head-and-shoulders above "secretary." It definitely wouldn't be a bumming-around job. This Dr. Drakken guy obviously had enough energy for about twenty mad scientists. Even now, the dude was squirming around in his seat like a little kid who'd had to pee for the last two hours.

But _bodyguard_? As in, a paid-by-the-punch job?

"Either or. I'd love to be both," Shego said. She let her lip snake up, just a notch, at the corner. "Believe it or not, I can fight."

"Believe it or not, I believe you." Drakken's eyes crossed, like he'd just blown out his own brain circuits, and then he chuckled. "Would you mind giving me a demonstration?"

Would she mind getting Coco Banana's autograph?

Shego scanned the room and let her gaze wilt on the _Sesame-Street_ -wannabe puppet thing propped against one cavern-type wall. A dead face - Xs for eyes and a flopping-out tongue - had been crayoned onto its cloth head.

"You expect me to fight _that_?" she said.

Drakken flipped his head toward Shego. The wild spikes of hair looked ready to take flight. She stifled a smirk. "Wha?" turned into "Ohhhh" as he followed her point. "No, that's for my henchmen's practice. They, err, can't hit a moving target yet."

Shego swallowed the _Can YOU?_ Even from here, she could see that Dr. Drakken had the upper-body strength of a Polly Pocket.

He didn't look like much to contend with - but, then, she probably didn't either. It had worked to her advantage several times; Shego could teach this Dr. D how to make it work to his.

"No, I'll have a simulation whipped up for you in a jiffy. Won't take but a moment!" Drakken sang out, his fingers clacking on the keyboard that Shego wished weren't so darn close to the next Black Death - or whatever Drakken was making in his chemistry set. He seemed the super-brainy, not-much-common-sense type, so she would sort of counterbalance that.

Shego was surprised by what a realistic replica of a Global Justice agent flickered into existence in front of her, brandishing a sickening good-guy smugness and a laser-blaster that Shego was all too happy to dodge the first two blasts of. It came as natural as breathing to her, and that left her mind to work like a VCR.

 _Straight up hand-to-hand combat. No plasma. Not right now. That super-nerd might put you behind glass._

"Now, this being a simulation and all, no blows he lands can hurt you." Drakken shot her a lopsided look. "Of course, it can be quite enjoyable to clutch your heart and fall to the floor and do a dramatic death scene."

"I'll keep that in mind."

Shego ducked and sped and sprung herself back up when she was two hairs short of a collision with the agent. His start gave her time to sweep his feet right out from under him. Shego wrapped it up with a kick to the face that made the hologram spit a tooth, gore-free, onto the floor.

Her muscles flexed in a silent cry of, _Oh, yeah!_

Shego glanced back at Drakken, who took a moment to throw his expression together. If _that_ was supposed to be an enigma, he didn't belong anywhere _near_ a game of poker. She'd obviously knocked his probably-worn-straight-through socks right off.

"Yes. Right." There was a throat-clearing, and Drakken's "Very impressive display" didn't SOUND like it had been dragged out kicking and screaming. "You may take your seat."

Shego dropped back into it. Across from her, Drakken folded his fingers into steeples and peered at her over the tops of them. It couldn't hide the arrogance in his eyes - arrogance slathered on over about six different complexes.

"Are you any good with machines?" He rolled his hand at a pile of thingamabobs in the corner. "Or chemicals?"

"Hate to break it to you, pal, but I wouldn't know any of those things from a trash compactor," Shego said. "And chemicals - I can shoot baking-soda-and-vinegar bottle rockets. That's about it."

It was a weird time for Drakken to smile, but Shego wasn't all that shocked that he did. "Wonderful! I'd be a bit touchy about being dethroned as the scientific brains behind this outfit! Tell me, is that why you decided to apply for a job as a sidekick rather than strike out on your own as a villain?"

Shego waited for a zing of irritation that never showed up. Dude - was that actual _faith_ in her she was hearing?

"I guess you could say that. That and I don't really have any schemes of my own." Just _saying_ "schemes" made her feel as lame as Avairius. "I mean, I definitely wanna watch the world suffer. I'm just not super-picky about how it happens." Shego finished with a cold shrug.

The arrogance parted to make way for a wicked gleam Shego wouldn't have banked on. "I love the way you think, Shego," Drakken said.

That was new. And better than Shego would ever admit to herself.

Drakken did some more yammering, none of which Shego caught beyond, "The world will be ours to mold like bread dough!"

She _almost_ couldn't believe how easy it was to picture this self-appointed madman with his sleeves hiked up to his elbows, kneading a wad of flour and yeast like that stereotypical happy housewife that had probably never existed.

"Next question," Drakken said. "Have you ever broken into a building?"

"Tons of times." He didn't need to know it'd been on "hero" work. "And I've _never_ tripped an alarm."

"Excellent!" Drakken scribbled something on the paper that happened to be closest to him and pointed the felt tip at Shego. "Now, my most recent plot, to incite an eruption on Mt. St. Helens that only I would have the power to quell, was foiled -" the hands dropped to his lap - "when I was surrounded by a convoy of Global Justice agents. I couldn't reach my Gravitomic Ray, and the volcano was outside the radius of my remote. What would you have done in such a situation?"

Shego didn't even have to blink. "I'd calculate the odds. If I knew I could take 'em down, I'd go straight into butt-kicking. And if I knew there were too many, I'd mow down the weakest link and get the heck outta there. Grab the nearest vehicle - car, boat, helicopter."

"You can pilot a helicopter?"

"Flew one here." Shego tipped back in her chair again, glad that the long legs she'd spent her whole adolescence tripping over touched the floor. "You should learn; it'd make your job way easier."

The guy planted his hands somewhere on a body that was about eighty percent torso. "As a matter of fact, I have learned!" Head-snap. Nonsense bluster.

Shego took that opportunity to continue sizing this Drakken guy up. Obviously, he had an excess of crazy ideas and lacked even so much as a clue as to how to get them off the ground.

This could work.

"Question Three," Drakken said. "Should I be captured and you manage to escape, will you come and break me out of jail at your earliest possible convenience?"

"Uh, yeah. I kinda need this job." Shego heard the peak in her voice. "And what if the roles were flip-flopped? You'd come get me, right?"

"Without question!" The jumbo-jaw tweaked up as if she'd offended him. Shego didn't miss the neediness splattered on his face.

"All right, moving on," Shego said. She gave her fingers the wave she used to dry her nail polish. "What's next?"

"Next - well, as I'm sure you've noticed, this is a very large lair." Drakken did a chest-thrust that almost sprawled him across the desktop. "So large that I can have my own quarters, the henchmen can have theirs, and. . . you can have yours?"

"Yeah, I'm getting an apartment." Not ALL of Hego's lectures had zero basis in reality. Although she would've _loved_ to have seen Brother Dearest's reaction if she'd accepted.

 _Sage_ head-bob that might've worked on someone who didn't give off a fifth-grade aura. "Yes. . . well. . . then. . . You can just use them for extra storage space, or for - for privacy. Your quarters will be completely separate from the henchmen's, and they'll be forbidden from entering. Yours, not theirs - of course. And, I mean, the henchmen are a bunch of big oafs, but they're not - they would never - gnnng -"

Drakken's knife-sharp cheekbones were the color of two strawberry Starbursts. Part of Shego wanted to egg him on, but a bigger part totally did _not_ want to have this conversation, so she let him compose himself - as best as he could - turn the paper around to face her, and say, "Is this an acceptable starter salary?"

The numbers were scrawled sideways, leaning on each other for support. It was about half of what Dementor had offered her.

"Yeah," Shego said.

Drakken tapped the pen against his nose, leaving behind a smear of ink that Shego decided not to tell him about just yet. "Is there anyone you would have me grant immunity. . . to. . . when I conquer the world?"

Shego tucked her fists out of sight and clenched them. Tried to squeeze the life out of the images floating around in her head - the purple face, the dead-pale one that'd _turn_ purple if he knew what she was doing this second, the two little ones that were just starting to lose their kid-chub. She could almost smell the boy-sweat, strong enough to gag an elephant.

"Could I get back to you on that?" she said.

Everything sinister evaporated from Drakken's smile for a sec. "Absolutely," he said. Wasn't hard to see those lips were barely holding back a thousand questions, but at least he didn't needle at her on the spot.

Come to think of it, this entire interview had pretty much been a string of "at least"s. But they were some honkin' huge ones.

"We done?" Shego asked. She'd meant to sound cocky and landed just half a beat off.

Drakken didn't seem to notice. "Almost. You know, overall, I think this has gone very well." The ponytail bobbed again. "Shego, you'd be an asset to my evil fam - team. You're an excellent fighter. And you seem to have a good head on your shoulders."

Imagine that. A guy who was interested in what she had _above_ her shoulders.

"I _do_ have one last question." One Polly-Pocket finger poked the air. "This is probably going to sound a little weird."

Shego let her mouth twitch. "No weirder than anything else you've asked me."

"But - do you have any superpowers or anything? I've heard of villains with powers, and I'm just curious. . ."

It wasn't any challenge to keep her face blank. Way below the surface, only her spirit grinned. Ear-to-ear.

Drakken's fingers had turned from a steeple to one of those pull-back-the-first-ball-and-get-the-last-one-jumping machines that he no doubt had a whole collection of, and Shego knew at that point she wasn't about to become a museum piece. Not that Dr. Drakken was probably _above_ that, but that body language was as disgustingly honest as Hego's. Drakken would come to hate that about himself, if he didn't already.

Shego exaggerated a sigh. "Does _this_ count?" She raised one hand, flared it to life - it was as easy as flipping a light switch by now - and waited for the toothy glimmer to dash her way again.

Instead, Drakken stared at her with fear-swollen eyes. "Your hand is on fire!" he cried.

"Oh my gosh, it is!" Shego looked at her hand as if she'd never seen it before and gave a mock gasp. "Imagine that!"

Drakken propelled his chair back across the room and launched himself from it before it even hit the wall, stumbling over untied tennies that didn't mesh with the rest of the evil-nerd outfit. "I'll call 9-1-1! What's their number?"

Really. He was seriously about to bring a team of EMTs to his secret lair.

Shego did a triple backflip to land in front of him, raised the flame to his eye level, and switched it back off. "Whoa! Whoa! Drakken! Relax. It's okay."

The big brow furrowed. "Your hand. . ."

"Yeah, I can do that. It's my power. I knew it was doing that, 'kay?" she said.

"More sarcasm?"

It eked out as a childish question, and Shego couldn't help but grunt. "It's kinda my native tongue."

After another second, Drakken victory-pumped his arms like he'd just scored a touchdown - though for the life of her, Shego couldn't picture him within five miles of a football field. "It's wonderful!" he said. "Between my superbrains and your superpowers, Shego, we'll make an unbeatable team! If, uh, that is, you decide to work for me."

Something about that slunk up Shego's backbone and swiveled to go right back down. "Yeah, but don't forget - I got some brains myself, D," she said, careful to keep her struck nerve out of it. Unless Drakken could somehow see her neck hairs bristling, he wouldn't have a clue.

"Of course I won't forget." Head-bob after apologetic head-bob. "And I really prefer Dr. Drakken."

Shego picked up on an aggravated huff at the end of it and dangled it with another shrug. "Dr. D., whatever."

Something muttered under Drakken's breath. His arms slouched at his sides until he looked as puppet-like as the GJ dummy Shego suddenly couldn't stand the sight of.

"I will agree with you on one thing, though, Drakken," Shego said. She flicked her plasma back on, took a second to warm it up to its deadliest, and slashed the dummy's head straight off its stupid little cloth neck.

It wasn't a holding-back slice. That thing sailed across the room and stopped Drakken smack in the middle of his "What's tha -?" He let out a baritone-screech and flailed his hands in front of his face. The head smacked into them with neatness Shego suspected wouldn't have worked if he'd planned it.

Shego let herself smile. "I think we'd make a great team."

Drakken gazed at her with unabashed awe on his face.

Hmm. . . the guy _did_ show signs of working brain cells, not that Shego would ever tell him, but there had to be somebody around to keep him from walking off cliffs and getting tricked by every e-mail scam in circulation. Had at least _some_ instincts to shield his face when you threw a projectile at it, even if those teeny-tiny hands made it pretty ineffective.

His needs were, like, tailor-made for Shego's skills. And she had to confess she liked that.

"So. . . is the interview over, then?" Drakken asked.

He was _really_ bad at this.

"Well, do you have any more questions for me?" Shego said.

Drakken shook his head. "Then it's over," he said - thankfully before she had to spell THAT out for him, too. "Will I be hearing from you again?"

Dementor and Falsetto and the rest of them would've sooner worn paper sacks than that vulnerable, puppy-with-separation-anxiety look. It was almost enough to make a person wanna trust Drakken - provided "trust" were a switch you could still flip.

Shego hoisted up her bag from the spot where she'd dropped it. "Probably."

"Then I must say, you conducted yourself excellently today! Wonderful meeting you, Shego." Drakken began to pad around for the nerd-goggles he must've forgotten were resting on top of his shaggy mess of hair. "Now if you'll excuse me, I must return to my plot to hijack the human growth hormone."

Man. This guy was _driven_. Shego made another mental note: _won't have to cattle-prod his rear into gear._

She took pity on him. "They're on your head, Dr. D."

"Wha -? Oh. Thank you." A pane of glass had already formed over each of Drakken's eyes before he popped the goggles back over them. "Can you show yourself out?"

"Um, how about no? This place is like an ant farm."

Drakken yanked the goggles out of place again and turned his mildly-ticked-off gaze to hers. It had been all over the place during the interview, but the only other part of _her_ it had strayed to was her burning hand.

"Of course." Drakken creaked the door to his "office" open and led her back down the hallway that could've been stolen from a horror park. At one point, he stepped on a shoelace and yanked the shoe completely off - and instead of bothering to put it back on, he hopped on one foot the rest of the way, muttering the whole time about defective shoelaces.

This guy was at least entertaining. As Shego turned and walked away, she felt a tiny twitch crook the corner of her mouth.

And she left feeling like she'd just splurged on an especially cleansing facial.

* * *

The sky was turning pink over the horizon by the time Shego arrived back at the hotel. She climbed from the helicopter's pilot seat and clicked on the invisibility field Drakken had told her almost all of HenchCo's helicopters came with.

 _Have to remember to thank him for that. This thing was getting a LITTLE conspicuous._

Once she was settled in her room for the night, Shego pulled out the lopsided handful of papers Drakken had given her right before she took off and all but went over her contract with a magnifying glass. She didn't find any legal loopholes, any _cover-my-butt_ policies. It was almost like Dr. Drakken wasn't suspicious by nature.

They'd have to work on that, too.

Shego shrugged at herself. Dr. D could have made a whole freak show all by himself, but he'd seemed nice enough. As supervillains went.

Not to mention she'd already run the salary and what her droning economics teacher would have called her "current cost of living" through a calculator three times - Shego had the weird image of Drakken beaming with pride every time she plugged in a number. She'd have enough to rent your basic one-bedroom apartment in less than two months.

 _Barring any unforeseen expenses,_ Mr. Drone reminded her.

Okay, who turned HIM on? She'd rather listen to Drakken.

Dork that he was, the dude had a lot of raw potential as a villain, and it'd be a shame if he got himself killed or bankrupted or shipped to Alcatraz before he got a fair shot at the whole world-domination gig. As soft as those eyes could be, there'd been an unmistakably warped mind hard at work behind them. And Shego wanted to be there when it came out to play.

She pulled open the nightstand drawer. Buried underneath her textbooks and the placed-by-the-Gideons Bible was the list of names Jack Hench had given her. All of them had been angrily scribbled out - except the last one.

Shego circled it in green Sharpie, smirked her way up to a half-real smile, and snapped off the light.


	30. Family Ties

**~I'm finally back! Fell a little behind (or a lot behind) on my proofreading over the Christmas break, but I managed to whip out two chapters. The second should be up in a few days, with any luck.**

 **A huge thanks to all my reviewers, including guest Lionheart! :D**

 **Timeline: Season 1~**

"Attention, lady and gentlemen!" Dr. Drakken booms into his personal megaphone. "I hereby announce that this year's Evil Family Picnic has. . . beguuuuuuunnn!"

The screech of feedback is heavy-duty enough to vibrate the wax from your ear canals, but the amount of command it carries renders that inconsequential. Nesting the megaphone in his right armpit, Drakken does a quick head-count of his henchmen. All present and accounted for.

Well, of course they are! Who would want to miss the Evil Family Picnic? One might as well be absent from school the day of the science fair!

Drakken knows he's been working too hard lately, running too tense. And when the boss is tense, it affects the atmosphere of the whole lair - not the actual CO2 count, the mood. They need a chance to bond again.

This is certainly his family of choice. The one he keeps no secrets from. The one united, not by blood, but by their passion for villainy. (Well, his and Shego's passion and the henchmen's. . . complacency, Drakken supposes.) Much as he loves his mother, Drakken's relationship with her has become a series of increasingly exhausting pretenses.

And not one of those HenchCo supervillain gatherings, either. Every time Drakken attends one, he ends up staring at the back of a constricted circle, one that never opens, feeling like a newly discovered element that no one has found a place for on the periodic table yet.

Here, though, he can be himself, his _real_ self - whimsical yet wicked. There will be plenty of good clean fun today, but also plenty of good _messy_ fun, including the unveiling of his Meltitron!

"So, Dr. D., ready for a little more egg on your face?" the lady says behind him.

Shego's barbs fall far short of the proverbial mark today. In fact, Drakken feels a smile flex into place. "Actually, I did some research on that event," he says, "and it turns out it's intended to be an egg-spoon _race_ and not an egg-spoon catching game."

"Imagine that."

Drakken allows only the barest smidgen of a glower to cross his face. No, there shall be no flattening of his spirits today. "That event's been canceled anyway. Have you seen what eggs are going for these days? It's ridiculous! Why spend that kind of money on something that's going to get broken anyway?"

"My boss, the cheapskate supervillain." Shego fashions a sly squint. "Lemme guess: you'd prefer to spend the money on some of kind doom rays - that are gonna get broken anyway?"

It's as if she strikes a match at the base of his spine, and Drakken has to puff several breaths onto it before it reaches the end of the fuse. "This means," he says, incisors locked together, "that the potato-sack race has been bumped up to our kick-off event."

Now _those_ he got for absolutely zero cost. He and the henchmen raided an old warehouse stocked with potato sacks, which now has potatoes piled up to the ceiling - and no sacks in sight. It's the first caper in quite a long while he's pulled off without Shego's help.

(All right, granted, there was no alarm, nor any security measures whatsoever, because in the grand scheme of things, this kind of heist is - dare he say it? - small potatoes.)

Shego jerks a pointed look over at the starting line. "Which it looks like they're starting without you."

Drakken's glands jump into action.

"Noooo! Stop!" He races toward the henchmen as fast as his little legs - his much- _too_ -little legs - will carry him. His arm waves as if he's flagging down a ship that's left the dock without him.

 _Nothing_ can start without him. It's a bubbling, oozing item that Drakken adds to his list of Why Dr. Drakken Needs To Dominate The World.

At least he has dominated his _henchmen_ into obeying his barked-out orders. They halt mid-motion and glance around at each other in bewilderment, a pack of mules wondering where they made their error. Drakken pants, a needle stabbing his side, and wonders for a prickly moment whether they were actually planning to start without him or if Shego was just eager to make him look the fool.

Whatever. They can begin now.

Drakken transplants himself into a potato sack, which sags down around his hips worse than Cousin Eddy's hand-me-downs. One hand gets a cockeyed hold on the fabric while Drakken uses the other to lift the megaphone again and ask, "Is everybody ready?"

Half the henchmen bob their heads, and the other half shake theirs. If they begin _this very second_ , Drakken will be the undisputed championship - a thought juicy enough to deserve consideration. And yet victory by default is like a fun-sized candy bar: tasty - and gone in seconds.

(Why _do_ they call them "fun-sized," anyway? What's "fun" about receiving a piece of candy the size of your thumbnail? Bigger is better at least ninety-nine percent of the time, and certainly when it comes to candy. . .)

Drakken waits a moment for the henchmen to get situated in their bags before bringing the megaphone to his lips again and bellowing a repeat of the question.

This time, he gets a chorus of "Yes!"es and upturned thumbs.

Drakken calls up the ringmaster intonation he's been practicing all month. "Then. . . on your mark! Get set! Go!"

Chucking the megaphone behind him, Drakken gives the whistle around his neck one quick tweet and takes off at the speed of a jackrabbit under duress. The image of Elmer Fudd - the only rabbit-hunter he's ever known - floods in with his groans of frustration, and Drakken snickers to himself and jumps faster.

Hop. Hop. Hop. The pattern echoes the thrusting in his chest. Hop. Hop. Hop. He reminds his knees to bend, not shuffle forward. Hop. Hop. Hop. The soles of his feet have numbed, and yet he keeps going. Hop -

Fred the henchman boings by then. His massive weight and some cruel trick of physics conspire to knock Drakken off balance and topple him to the ground. The blow strikes right above his rib cage, its sting like a colony of wasps, turning his arms stringy and loose. No matter how hard he works to tauten them, they are useless for re-elevating himself.

 _Obey me! I command you!_ Drakken orders his body with all of his inner ringmaster, his inner villain, his inner Person Who Drops Teenagers To Sharks. _Pull yourself together! I cannot lose!_

If elbows were capable of talking, his would have just said, _Good luck, bud._

Envisioning a crowd cheering him on, begging him with their sustaining roar not to give up, Drakken utilizes the most cooperative sector of himself - his wrists. He manages to hoist them forward and, millimeter by millimeter, drag the rest of him behind, potato sack and all.

 _I'm doing it!_ A copper wire sparks to life somewhere inside Drakken. _I'm actually doing it!_

His fingers touch the chalked-grass finish line right after Fred and Mark bounce over it and promptly spill out of their bags in the manner of ill-packed groceries.

Drakken drops his head to the dirt to pout for only the weeds to see. Elmer Fudd would be crying, "Goldurn it all!" and Drakken wouldn't blame him. A thought loops through his mind with the staying power of a commercial jingle:

 _Bigger is better?_

* * *

Evil Family Picnic Island is the nearest one over from the haunted lair island. Lush, fertile, and yet untouched by retail developers. This one doesn't _technically_ , legally belong to Drakken. Although he's long since crumpled up legality and tossed it aside like a used napkin: it is something he never - well, very, very rarely - worries about.

At any rate, it's nice to have a place to decompress. Sometimes angst and suffering - even if they're someone else's and you long to activate them - can line your insides and knock your sight crooked, and you just need to take a brief break.

There's something else lengthening the shadows of his lair, too, something Drakken hasn't become yet, something he's working up to. Something he both anticipates and dreads, like the finale of a good program. There are moments when he can sense it, curling ice around him, freezing him into a place, a place where he would love to go if only he had remembered to prepare his knit cap and his mittens.

And it's as though Evil Family Picnic Island has some invisible force field that keeps it at bay.

That must account for the sudden lightness of his shoulders, Drakken decides, as he blasts his whistle again. "All right, men!" he cries. "Line up for the beanbag toss!" He strikes a knuckle against the splintering wood where one of the henchmen - Bill or Bob, someone with a "B" name - has painted a crude-but-recognizable clown.

Beside him, Shego shudders. "I _hate_ clowns," she says.

For an instant, the sneering countenance parts and her youth breaks through. Drakken always forgets how very young Shego is, still attending college through the mail, too young to be the deadliest person he knows. It's gone before it can even clutch at his lungs.

"Now, I'm sure you all know how this works," Drakken keeps on, as if he _hasn't_ just watched stainless steel bend in front of him. "You take those beanbags and chuck them through ol' Chuckles' mouth here. You get a point for every throw, and, counter to the norm, lowest score wins! And don't even think about starting without me! I'm the officiator."

"'Officiator'?" Shego says.

Drakken whirls on her. "It's a word!"

Shego's hands fly up to cover ears already hidden by that mane, and Drakken realizes with a drizzle of guilt that he just snapped those words through the megaphone.

She knocks it away, more harshly than the situation calls for, as far as Drakken is concerned. "And how can they start without you?" Shego says. "You're all _right here_."

Statistically speaking, one person should not be right this often. There has to be some kind of cheat, some kind of trick, calling "heads" on a two-headed coin to cement a win.

Shego nudges him in the exact spot that took the brunt of his fall, and the mathematics of it all blur away into his struggle not to yelp. Drakken turns back to the henchmen, finagles the megaphone back into his own grasp, and hollers, "You may begin!"

A select few sink holes-in-one (hole-in-ones?). Most chuck two or three or four - or five - bags before sinking one. And poor Fred hacks his score up into double digits as his attempts ricochet wildly off Chuckles's head.

Finally, it is Drakken's turn. He hands his precious megaphone to Shego and strolls, head thrown back, to the throwing range. "Let me show you how a pro does it," he says.

He blames Shego's snort. It confuses him, distracts his aim; it's her fault his beanbag smacks Chuckles square in the eye. The second and third bags - and the fourth and the fifth - he has no such excuse. They consistently nail everything _except_ the hole.

"Michael Jordan, eat your heart out," Shego mutters.

Forget daggers - Drakken glares a whole sword at her. "So I'm not an athlete. So sue me!" He winds back, throws again, and the beanbag collapses into the dust an inch from the board.

By now, even the henchmen are chuckling, and Drakken can hear the grinding of his own jaw. The ugliness of the clown seems to taunt him: its bright red literal honker of a nose, the grotesque white paint around its eyes, the gaping maw where he can't land a single shot. He knows the science of it, has a path calculated in his mind - it's just that his limbs refuse to follow, as if they are running on a separate circuit from his brain.

Why did he ever add a beanbag toss to the roster anyway?

Oh, right. Because the "guess-your-weight-and-fortune" thing wound up making the henchmen self-conscious of their huge, piggish selves, and there were tears, which Drakken thought were ridiculous reactions to numbers on a scale - until he climbed on himself and found himself to be sixteen pounds smaller and wussier than he would have estimated. So it was sacked in favor of - well, more sacks.

Ordinarily, that thought could at least crack a grin out of Drakken. Right now, however, his every tendon is seething with frustration, burning his throat dry. He imagines that clown is Kim Possible, and to sink this beanbag is to defeat her once and for all!

It's an idea that improves his potency - not his aim. His next beanbag barely grazes Chuckles's striped hat.

A breeze slaps him right in the face on its way by. Drakken can't appreciate its freshness, its fall-crispness, for the load of ragweed pollen it shoves up his nostrils. He doesn't have hideous hay fever, unlike some people whose orifices water from March to December, but a noseful of pollen doesn't get a very good reception, either.

The very hairs in his nose tingle, all the way up his sinuses to sting his brain. For a moment, Drakken is sure there will never be relief, that he will tingle until he gags. And then the sneeze erupts, launching him backward and forcing him into a hard blink and slinging the beanbag from his hands.

When Drakken opens his eyes, contacts swimming, Chuckles's mouth gapes open as though in disbelief of the black-and-blue missile that sits inside it.

"Yes!" Drakken pumps both fists into the air and almost takes another dive backward. "I am the champion!"

"Um, actually, you have one of the _highest_ scores," Shego begins, but she's drowned out by the henchmen.

Their burst of applause is too poorly coordinated to be an actual "round," although that's the last thing Drakken is going to complain about now. As a matter of fact, with their screams of "Way to go, Boss!" and "Ya did it!", that old soccer player Michael Jordan _can_ eat his heart out.

Or does he play baseball?

Bah, no matter. Drakken takes another look at his dunked beanbag and smiles so widely he can feel the wind on his tongue. He can almost see himself as an Internet "meme" - one of those pictures-with-captions that a person can't escape from these days:

 _I win with my EYES SHUT, yo!_

* * *

Drakken bends down and cinches the rope connecting his ankle to Shego's. It's an easy knot. What's harder is ignoring the fact that Shego's feet are slim and sleek and their toes poke out several centimeters past the ends of his.

"We are going to knock their socks off!" Drakken says. He tilts his head down at Shego, chortling in the manner befitting a genius. "Get it, Shego? Socks - leg joke?"

Shego gives him a stare like wood. Drakken's giggles drift off to wherever giggles go to die, and he straightens to try and match her sophistication. "All right, are we ready?" he calls over her scalp to the henchmen.

A unanimous nod from them.

"Then on your mark -" Mark the henchmen glances up at that, the dunderhead - "get set - go!"

Drakken tweets the whistle and then takes off, one foot pinwheeling in the air, the other scraped against Shego's leg pouch, so tightly he can feel the outline of her nail file against his calf. "Turn left, Dr. D!" he hears her yell.

He does - and narrowly avoids being kicked in the temple by Mark. Drakken's attempt to crouch slides him sideways, kept in a semi-vertical position only by Shego's unwavering. . . ness.

"Your _other_ left!" Shego says. The scorn oozes like pus.

Drakken's eyes remain fiercely dry as he flips himself back up. After all, it's not _his_ fault his mental compass is so advanced that it sees the world in terms of east and west instead. Not his fault that he can't stop and check the shapes formed by thumbs and index fingers in the middle of a _race_!

They take off again. Every one of Shego's movements is as quick and limber as a doe's, though that seems rather too innocuous an animal to liken her to. Drakken feels closer to a three-legged hedgehog by comparison, scrabbling at her side, able to keep the pace but not the form, tripping over things that aren't there. The rope sneaks its way between his lab coat and boot top and burrows into his flesh.

At least they aren't in last place, though. That dishonor currently belongs to Bill and Fred, who fell three steps into their departure and are now flat on their stomachs, too bulky and uncoordinated to rise again. In this case, bigger isn't always better.

"Suckers!" Drakken can't help taunting them over his shoulder.

That, Drakken later decides, is probably was he doesn't see that one patch of grass - the insidious one, more knife blade than grass blade, wintered early and lurking among the rest that is still summer-downy - until it stabs through the sole of his boot. The pain is more a shock than anything; nevertheless, Drakken yelps and brings the injured foot up to inspect, leaving him literally without a leg to stand on.

Shego grabs his hand, forces him to let the foot drop. Her eyes are firing laser guns at him. For a moment, Drakken is paralyzed by the prospect of channeling those into actual weapons.

The thought is so amazing that he goes slack, and then he is entirely at the mercy of Shego's wiry strength. She charges across the grass with Drakken wobbling beside her.

The finish line - he can see it now!

Surely if he stays still and lets Shego carry him across said line, they can't lose. And yet something about that sits uneasily in Drakken's throat. If he doesn't have a hand - well, a foot - in his own victory, he'll never hear the end of it - not verbally, not from the henchmen, who are generally fairly compliant, but from Shego's knowing smirks, which might be enough to penetrate the island's force field and allow the chest-itch access to him once more.

Drakken moves forward in spurts, like a dying engine, and then his free foot bends sideways - in that terrible, world-blurring way that puts visions of paralysis in your brain and your muscles - and he's down on the ground. Shego's coiled next to him, and he can feel the seething heat coming off her skin.

Oops.

"Sorry! I'll fix it!" Drakken does an elbow-push-up, shifts his weight to his other arm, and promptly collapses back again, the whistle painfully phasing into his sternum.

Shego's jerking their combined leg. "Dr. D., just stay still and lemme -"

"Nonsense!" Drakken barks, sweat beading under his ponytail. "I am perfectly capable of leading us to victory!" His foot flails and fails, refusing to do what his synapses are commanding it to, and when it finally does stick, it's far too runty to hoist of the rest of his (strapping, masculine) body up with it.

Shego thrusts a finger east. "Dr. D, is that Marie Curie?"

Drakken jerks to follow her point, not only because Marie Curie is a great scientist whom he admires greatly, but also because she is long-dead, and an appearance by her now may rewrite the laws of the natural world.

She isn't there. Nobody is there save for a single cirrostratus cloud.

And then Shego is off, bumping Drakken along behind her, as though he is as wispy as the pollen cells, as though he is a vapor. Though the drag is too brisk for his cheeks to flush, he feels his insides flame. Shego runs more gracefully on one leg than most people can manage on two, and when she zips across the finish line, their feet are the only trio that have made it.

Shego reaches down and undoes the knot. Her smile is a phantom in and of itself.

It chases Drakken's own scowl away, and he grins back at her. "We won, Shego!" he declares.

"Uh, no. _I_ won - because you have two left feet." Shego pokes the spot of the grass slice. "And that's left as in this side."

"Ngggh! Mehhgk!"

The giant blocky grunts of his ire sound wan and weak as they spill out of Drakken. He wonders, vaguely, if there are people born with two left feet, and whether they resent being equated with sheer hopelessness.

They can't possibly resent it as much as he does.

* * *

The test-your-strength bell-ringer competition doesn't _have_ a winner. Just an un-winner. Every single henchman - and Shego, the only person at this gathering smaller than Drakken himself - send the wedge all the way to the top and are rewarded with a victory chime. When Drakken first takes the hammer in his hands, it topples him over backward. The second time, he hits his big toe instead, hard enough to blind himself for a moment. The third slam takes the wedge a few meager feet up, where it makes a sickly dragging noise before slinking back to the bottom.

He _does_ , however, come in second at the obstacle course. It helps that this year it's been moved to _precede_ the pie-eating contest, since Drakken never feels much like moving afterward, although he concludes that shouldn't in any way lessen the amount of credit he gets. Dr. Drakken may not be especially strong or fast or agile, but he's adept at wriggling and problem-solving, a master of the last-minute dodge and the creative contortion.

First-place, of course, goes to Shego - who must have been genetically modified to have the sight of a falcon, the hearing of a fennec fox, and the speed of a cheetah. An upgrade of your average human being.

Still, second place is - despite the ragweed on the wind - nothing to sneeze at.

* * *

"Annnnnnnnnd _time_!"

Drakken lifts his face, swallows one last blueberry-filled mouthful, and immediately gets busy crossing the fingers on both hands. He's lost track of how many fillings he's inhaled, how many different crusts he gobbled. Is is enough to maintain his four-year winning streak?

"Let's see." Ted stands at one end of the many benches shoved together to form one immense table. "Mark, Bill, Chad, Dan, and Casey each had two pies. Rick and Nick ate three. And Dr. Drakken ate. . . ." There's an unbearable pause. "Four."

Four. It's a good, solid number. Drakken approves.

"He made it past the raspberry, strawberry, and pumpkin all the way into blueberry," Ted continues, awe scribbled in the margins of his voice. "We have a winner!"

Make that a _five_ -year streak.

Drakken snickers to himself - and it hurts just enough that he doesn't bother to slurp the pie crumbs off his lips. Still, it's well worth it. This is a place, one of the few, where he's been able to showcase his skills. Prove to the world that Dr. Drakken is anything but average himself.

Victory is - _heh-heh_ \- sweet.

Drakken accepts high-fives and back-slaps from the henchmen, modestly waving a hand that he lets himself imagine is dripping with jeweled rings. And decides to go ahead and conjure up a worthy background while he's at it: the throne room of a majestic palace, backlit by diamond chandeliers, dipping down from ceilings high enough to accommodate an elephant - or two - one wall taken up by an interior waterfall whose mist is only ever the warmest and most luxurious. . .

Someone _oink_ s behind him. "Having fun, little piggy?" the someone says. Drakken would know that scoff anywhere.

With his heart beating somewhere around his belly button, Drakken sets his jaw, refuses to play her game. "The term you're looking for is 'congratulations,'" he says. "Or 'congrats,' if you want to shorten it, as you young people so often do."

Shego considers that for one-eighth of a second before sinking onto the bench beside him with a shake of the unrivaled hair. "Uh-huh. Nope. Not the term I'm looking for. More like, 'How the heck did you win again'?"

Close enough for him. Modesty is now completely unreachable, so Drakken doesn't even bother to mix it in when he smiles at her. "Call it a natural talent."

"Talent? More like a hollow leg."

Another layer of smugness settles inside Drakken. This is the first _true_ opportunity he's had to gloat today, and it shall not be soured by her attitude. "Shows what you know, Shego. Legs aren't part of the digestive system in any way."

Shego will not admit she walked right into that one. She just sighs - and it's her _Drakken-why-are-you-such-a-pain-in-the-neck?_ sigh, not her _curses-I've-been-bested_ sigh. That one she saves for Kim Possible, and every time the little upstart teenager drags it out, Shego looks like she'd rather be performing her own root canal.

She has insubordination down to an art form. Doesn't even need to talk to demean him, not when she employs her hair and her breath and every confident speck of her body.

Not that it matters in light of his triumph.

Shego's sniff is light and breathy, which _can_ portend of near-friendliness. . . or not. "Do you know many people would kill for your metabolism?"

"That'd be a rather pointless murder," is his response. Although Drakken knows he wouldn't be much of a megavillain if he didn't believe some things were worth killing for, the ability to burn calories a little faster has never struck him as one of them.

Drakken lays down on the bench and rests his hands on the slight shelf his stomach has formed. At least he doesn't feel wispy and weightless anymore.

There's something to be said for that.

* * *

Drakken dabs at a blot of raspberry filling on his chin and sits up as straight as his fullness will allow. He doesn't want to miss the moment where they call his name and hand him a medal and he waves to the adoring crowd. It will be good practice for the day he finally takes over the world.

Not to mention there's still his big demonstration coming up. . .

He's already been up on the makeshift stage once to receive a prize - well, half a prize: the three-legged-race trophy, which unhinges right at the curve, so that each victor receives a flat semi-bowl with one spiraled horn, like a deformed ram. It's a lovely symbol of the teamwork needed to win the event, and Drakken hates himself for having come up with it.

It's one thing for the henchmen, who share everything anyway - experiences, sandwiches, even each other's socks - until they bleed together into one person of fluctuating height and variant skin color. He and Shego, on the other hand, are polar opposites, and without the magnetic field of evil there to keep them aligned. . .

At any rate, it's no honor to limp up to the stage on your injured ankle and receive your deformed ram and notice the whole time how closely your legs resemble chopsticks compared to Shego's sinewy ones.

The second-place ribbon for the obstacle course felt a little better. Drakken fluffs the plumage where it lies spread across his lap. As happy as he was to get it, and as pretty a shade of peppermint-red as it is, he can't help wishing it were blue - a deep blue to match his lab coat and his aspirations.

"And last but not least, the winner of the pie-eating contest, _for five years in a row_ ," says Phil, the designated Master of Ceremonies since he was the one person not to win a prize this year. His words seem to move super-slowly, like a video being stepped through frame by frame. "Your boss, Dr. Drakken!"

That's him! This is his moment of glory!

Drakken springs from the chair, surprised at his own speed in the stilted atmosphere, and bounds across the grass to the stage. Phil sticks the microphone directly in Drakken's hand, rather than putting it back in the stand and lowering it to Drakken's level, which Drakken decides deserves a smile.

"Speech! Speech! Speech!" The chant is started by a woman and taken up by the raucous, low-throated cries of five dozen men.

Despite the nervous flutter going through him, Drakken's smile grows until it obstructs the lower quadrant of his vision. Shego _wants_ to hear him give a speech? He must not squander this opportunity.

Drakken holds the microphone at a right angle to circumvent feedback. "Lady and gentlemen," he begins, "I just want to say it has been such a priv - _uuurrrrrrrrrrrrrppppp_ -"

The crowd goes wild. Blotching from the neck up, Drakken forces himself not to look at Shego. She will be laughing or have her lip curled to her forehead - or somehow defying the laws of human anatomy in order to do both at the same time.

Drakken clears his throat. "Excuse me," he says. "It's been a privilege to out-eat each and every single of one of you today. But that's not what our Evil Family Picnic is all about, now, is it?" He hears himself soften. "Our Evil Family Picnic is about togetherness and - and camaraderie, and in that respect we are all winners! I would gladly beat all of you into the ground any day!"

An all-male chorus of cheers goes up. Drakken does glance at Shego this time. Her eyes are rolling back toward her bangs, and the pies in his belly wilt.

Phil steps forward and bends down - a detail Drakken quickly eradicates from his memory - to drape a fake-gold medal around Drakken's neck. There's polite applause, and it's such a perfect segue that Drakken flings his arms out and proclaims, "And now, without further ado, the Meltitron!"

The Meltitron, a boxlike contraption on four stocky wheeled legs, is rolled out onto the stage. It's polished to a promising silver, and its buttons are raised like welts. For longer than a moment, Drakken marvels at his own twisted craftsmanship.

"We will, of course, use this to achieve our goal of world domination." Drakken says this last part to remind himself he is still a supervillain at the crux of his being. It's disturbing how easily he cast his proud mantle aside.

But as soon as he steps behind the controls of the Meltitron, it all comes back to him, hearty and thick and thrilling. Drakken runs a reverent finger down the side panel, careful not to hit a button, before calling out, "Bring out the victim!"

It take seven henchmen to carry out the victim, a hapless block of lead leftover from his lead balloon scheme, which went over like a. . . well, never mind.

Drakken grips one lever. He can feel the power coursing through his body, power his standard five-foot-ten-ish frame does not have on its own. He needs to savor it, not scarf it as he did with the pies, savor it with his eyelids shut.

When they open again, Drakken summons all his brutish intent (it gives him the strength to go with it) and yanks the lever back. A hot red ray, white as he blinks, shoots from the Meltitron's trigger and connects with the lead, starting the dribble instantly. Over and over, it scorches its prey in quick, bold zaps, and the lead liquifies faster than the ice-cream-cake Drakken left out of the freezer for too long last year.

Within minutes, there is only a smoldering puddle of slop trickling down into the mammoth-sized rain gutter he had the foresight to build. All right, so it was at Shego's insistence - but he had tracked her meaning from the beginning, not a lick of argument or confusion on his part, which in Drakken's mind earns him at least partial credit.

Drakken stares down at the glop that was once hard enough to break his bones, breathing faster and more intensely than he has all day. The something he is almost ready to become crouches on the lip of reality, getting nearer.

"It works!" calls a henchman.

Drakken whirls on the voice that sounds so astonished. "Why, of course it works! This little beauty, my friends" - he gives the Meltitron an affectionate pat - "is our ticket to world domination!"

 _As soon as I figure out what to do with it._

Phil thrusts a fist in the air. "Five cheers for the boss!"

Drakken is secretly glad they're too stupid to know it's traditionally only supposed to be three. His self-esteem will take all the extra hip-hip-hoorays it can get.

Besides, if he holds in air and listens really, really hard - he thinks he can hear a woman cheering in there somewhere.

* * *

A patina of colors bursts brightly on the horizon, one last hoorah before it fades away into the ever-earlier night.

Drakken nods vaguely at the sight. Standing on the rise overlooking the sunset, his face feels warm and sunny. The stuffy, too-many-pies feeling and the worn-out muscles in his legs and the fatigue wearing his eyes down into their bags all just sort of get up and wander away.

He's. . . content.

That's something a supervillain doesn't feel very often, Drakken lets himself admit. Or else why would they be busting their backs trying to conquer the world in the first place?

The thought sends a ripple over his mood, the way the first boot print smears a newly-waxed floor. Drakken sighs to himself and turns three degrees to the left and startles because Shego has noiselessly appeared at his elbow. How does she _do_ that?

Still, Drakken collects himself in under five seconds (a personal record for him). He wipes a casual hand across his forehead and gestures to the sunset. "Beautiful, isn't it, Shego?"

He wants to know she can find pleasure in something that doesn't involve someone else's _dis_ pleasure.

Shego throws a look back over her shoulder toward the sunset. "Sure, I guess."

A certain sorrow scours Drakken at her shrug, and it might dull the sparkle of his surroundings if Shego didn't immediately follow it up with, "So have you figured out what you want your new toy to do yet?"

The thought perks Drakken's ponytail even as it needs to wag a "no." Yes, soon it will be time to return to business as usual, put the whimsy of today behind him. He can feel a scheme clinging to him from the inside, excess spider-webbing that needs to be strung and carefully patterned before it stops him up.

What happens to spiders who can't let out their silk, after all? Why, they - they - they - well, Drakken doesn't know, but it's certainly nothing good. . .

Drakken parks both hands on the cramped region of his back and folds his upper body over it until it cracks. He has a few more hours before he has to spin his web. The sunset isn't quite finished yet.

"Do _you_ have any ideas?" Drakken poses. The question is an obstacle course in and of itself, a minefield that must be navigated on light feet to obtain the reward at the other end. He spoons a painstakingly-measured amount of snideness into his delivery so that she will believe (and rightly so!) that he does not _need_ her input, is merely curious.

Shego's grunt is encrypted. "You could. . .oh, I know! You could break into the national mint, melt down the gold bullion, can it, and then re-form it back at your lair."

Drakken feels a circuit complete behind his eyes and light them up. "Shego, that is a marvelous idea!" he says. "Is it from a James Bond movie or something?"

(He hasn't watched many of those. Just too hard to watch the world's most polished, hardworking evil minds lose to an agent with nary more than a roguish accent and an itchy trigger finger.)

"No," Shego says, unflappable even in the presence of greatness. "A cartoon, actually. Still, most of your plans sound like you ripped 'em off some Saturday-morning villain anyway."

The veins seethe in Drakken's neck. Half-formed sounds tickle his tongue, and he waits until they have withered to say, "It'd be _nice_ to have some gold bullion around, though."

It wasn't meant to be a whine.

"Why?" Shego says. "What would you even do with it? I mean, it's not like you can use it to pay for stuff."

Darn her practicality, even though it has served him well many times over the years. Just _darn_ it! Drakken scrubs a weed with his boot and says, "I could just leave it lying around the lair as a tangible reminder of how rich I am."

There's a feeble wave to his answer, and Drakken cringes the second it leaves him.

Sure enough, a scalding verbal stream rips from Shego's mouth. "No, Dr. D! If you ever take over the world, go ahead and do that, but not _now_. You're not gonna get a little bit of luck and then waste it on something you'll never use except for bragging rights. You know who does that?"

Drakken finds himself rewinding back to a preschooler, being chastised for melting down his mother's lipstick to aid in one of his earliest chemical experiments. He straightens to his full inch-and-a-half superiority, but he is less a tower and more a beanstalk, his arms like two vines that need to be pruned back so as not to overwhelm the rest of the plant, especially the stunted roots. . .

"Who does that?" Drakken says. He hopes his bitter bark veils that it is a real question, one he doesn't have an answer to.

"Drug dealers, that's who!"

Drakken sits back, stunned as if by the mercy setting of one of his own deadly weapons.

The stun breaks when Shego mutters, "And I know you're smarter than them. . . "

Drakken's ears perk at the words, the way Commodore Puddles's do at "walk." "You do?" he asks. "Why?"

"Uh, because you're not dealing drugs."

It's the closest thing to a compliment she has paid him all month. Drakken hugs it to the spot where his medal strikes against his chest, which is doubtlessly expanding in brawniness.

"Well, yes, thank you, Shego," he says. "There shall be no gold bullion for me, then! Dr. Drakken does nothing that would put him on the level of a common street. . . rustler. . ."

Shego's eyes close. "Drakken. Don't try. Please don't try."

Awash in mixed signals, Drakken lapses into silence. The day's final rays envelope him, locked in by the island's force field, warming his skin even as he both anticipates and dreads his return to the capricious dark of his everyday life. Although he knows it is scientifically impossible - not to mention ridiculously sentimental - Drakken briefly wishes he could bottle the essence of the sunset, to spritz on himself later when he needs a pick-me-up.

(See? Preposterous! Any fool could tell you that to be spritzed by the sun would be even worse than making contact with the Meltitron.)

"Not that I'd mind having some extra money around," Shego says. "Do you have any idea how much cash you blew today?"

Drakken shakes his head with a ferocious frown. No, he doesn't, and he won't until he balances the checkbook again at the end of the month, and he prefers it that way. He dedicates _one_ day as a Vacation From Responsibility, and Shego _still_ nags him for it.

Then again, perhaps it wasn't intended as a nag. Shego can be very hard to interpret. She is that code machine the Germans developed during World War II, where the meaning of each given symbol changed every time the clock struck midnight.

Congratulating himself for that metaphor - simile - whatever - figure of speech, Drakken employs a carefree shrug. "Oh, I don't know. What would I do with more money, anyway?"

For an instant, Shego is frozen in a gaped-mouth stare, as though he has bombed all the sarcastic replies in her brain. Then her eyes roll and she is back, on top again, jeering down at him below. "All kinds of things. Buy an iron maiden or something."

Why would he want a metal woman - ?

Oh. The pies recoil. One of the portable rooms with the spikes on every wall would make a great addition to his vile decor, Drakken has to admit, but to actually _use_ one of them? Brrr. His brand of torment tends more toward the psychological. (Much neater. And crueler, of course.)

Drakken snags the shiver running across his larynx and converts it into a throat-clearing of magnificent proportions. "Actually, Shego, the idea that iron maidens were medieval torture devices is nothing more than a prevalent misconception."

"O-kay -"

"They weren't truly invented until _centuries_ later," Drakken continues, "and then only as sideshow attractions meant to horrify tourists! As far as I know, nobody has ever actually used them to kill."

Drakken swings his face away from Shego's before he can read the truth that he already knows is on it - he is not ready to be the first.

Not yet. Not while there's still a visible horizon.

Drakken reaches up and fingers the medal, cool now to the touch. Its gold is probably only pyrite - or even just spray-painted copper - joyously stamped with the picture of a man holding an empty, defeated pie crust.

A man with a scar. And a unibrow. And a grin amply stocked with teeth.

Light returns, around him and beneath him and through him, as though he has been spritzed by the sun - in a good way - after all; Drakken clasps the medal close and grins with it.

It's him. It's _him_. The henchmen _knew_ he was going to win.

He vows he will never take it off.


	31. A What-Over?

**~If anyone's just been dying for a rewrite of a certain _Dimension Twist_ scene from Drakken's POV, you're in luck! :D **

**Timeline: Season Three, obvs. And I guess I should include a standard-issue warning for cartoon characters cartoonishly wearing less clothing than they would prefer.**

 **Enjoy, guys!~**

Dr. Drakken is seriously weighing whether or not to zap the Evil Eye Trio with a doom ray.

It isn't a matter of ethics; he's a _supervillain_ , for the love of rutabagas, and normally those who show up uninvited at his lair are lucky to escape with a hotfoot. Then again, today hasn't been "normal" even by the standards of mad science.

Which is precisely his problem. Drakken was sure, he was so _sure_ that he'd correctly rewired the Pan-Dimensional Vortex Inducer (which perhaps a _small_ amount of help from Kim Possible's computer kid) and that he'd successfully warped them back into his own lair. . . but instead, they've wound up on an episode of one of Drakken's guilty-pleasure TV shows, _Evil Eye for the Bad Guy_.

Just when you thought it was safe to go back to reality. . .

What are the cosmic ramifications of killing a fictional character? Or are they _actual characters used fictitiously_ , as they say in the copyright sections of books? And if Drakken is now tethered to their show, does that mean he is currently a fictional character?

Drakken scowls around at the charlatan lair that copies his own so convincingly. With his luck, someone has probably made an action series starring Kim Possible and cast him as the ineffectual villain. And the invisible cameras surely never capture his best side! (Which, contrary to convention, is the side _with_ the scar, bragging of the pain he's encountered and lived through. . .)

Okay. Focus. He needs to focus.

On the Evil Eye Trio.

That their presence is unnerving him would be shameful even for a non-villain. Their appearances certainly don't fit the intimidation bill. They're slimmer even than Drakken, but neat, classy, streamlined about it; without elbows and ribs and other gawky angles sticking out everywhere. One wears his hair slicked from his face and held back with about twenty gallons of hair tonic, another has an upper lip fuller than Mother's, and the third wears thin-framed glasses that don't look nerdy at all, the unfairness of which flares red sparks across Drakken's own contact-enhanced vision.

The non-geeky glasses-wearer turns to one of said unseen cameras and delays, the way characters on sitcoms wait for the studio audience to stop howling. There have surely been presidential terms shorter than this silence. (Such as when that one poor fool gave a two-hour acceptance speech, then promptly caught pneumonia and died. That's number twenty-six on Drakken's list of Things NOT To Do After I Become The Planet's Overlord. )

"We have here," Non-Geek says, "a villain who desperately needs a makeover."

Drakken immediately knows that they cannot be talking about the sophisticated Shego, and he glances around, hoping against hope that some other hapless, out-of-style villain will come crawling from the mahogany woodwork.

One doesn't, of course. Their eyes are on him, mean, hard, judging eyes. Drakken swallows hard. That usually helps, but it feels like he just took in a mouthful of arsenic. If they don't move their gazes, he'll be dead soon, and it'll all be their fault. And their lips are curling over themselves like dying centipedes.

Drakken rubs his hand self-consciously over his chin, wishing he hadn't shaved this morning. Even the thin scattering of whiskers he was able to grow over the course of a week might have formed a sort of see-I'm-hip-keep-away-from-me goatee.

It turns out to be a bad move. The motion of his hand across his jaw is all the invitation Big Lip needs to grab Drakken by the cheekbones hard enough to leave fingerprints in Drakken's flesh. Big Lip jerks their faces close together so that Drakken can count each individual, perfected strand in his eyebrows, pale as butter.

"Blue skin _is_ so out," he says. With a sneer.

Drakken is used to people taking in his atypical skin color and assuming he is sickly, but he's never been so thoroughly berated for it before.

Of _course_ blue skin is out! That's something he's been coping with for the past three years of his life! That doesn't mean that it can't come back _in_ again.

Thinking positively doesn't help. His face is still being held in a vise grip. Drakken shoots a frantic eye-message to Shego: _Start sassing them! Now! Please!_

And she doesn't. Why does he keep her around, anyway?

When Big Lip finally unpins his gaze from Drakken's, he sends it scanning down the length of Drakken's body. Drakken has the distinct impression that he is being airbrushed, like a leaf of lettuce in a burger commercial that had the audacity to wilt.

Big Lip turns back and gives his colleagues a single look. Slick Bangs catches it, and its meaning, easily. That was one of the things Drakken always _used_ to admire about them: their synchronization, their flow. Not since his own majestic Bebes has he seen such a fine hive-mind at work.

"Definitely needs a new wardrobe," Slick Bangs says. "I mean, what are you, some kind of mad scientist?"

What type of question is _that_?

"Ye-es!" Drakken's arms fly from his sides of their own accord, and he stops his tongue before it can add, "You imbeciles!" This is going on the air, after all, and he's not sure they allow that kind of language on television.

Slick Bangs rotates away and holds up a palm that brooks no compromise. It is nothing more than lines and creases and whorls, the same as Drakken's though in a more typical hue, and yet it cements him to the floor, increasing circulation to his cheeks.

He _does_ have other outfits, but they're all in the laundry. Well, heaped at the bottom of his hamper, waiting to go into the laundry, actually, but that's beside the point! The point is - what's _wrong_ with his lab coat?

Drakken finds himself looking ahead at the _others_ in front of him - Kim Possible with her fair skin and eyes that seem stuck in a somersault. The buffoon with his freckles and his indignant expression. And Shego with her one-grass-stain-away-from-dead-white face and her twitch that is threatening to pop into laughter any second now. If any of them come forward to save him, he will literally kiss even the buffoon's odoriferous sneakers.

Nope, he's on his own.

"Ohh, ohhh, ohh!" Non-Geek sidles up beside Drakken, his screech close to that of someone who just saw a four-pound cockroach. Drakken perks around to scan the room for such a creature - and finds he can no longer turn his head. Not with his ponytail held captive between two pincherlike fingers. " _Fix_ the _hair_!"

The man is _touching his hair_.

Drakken's thoughts are clanging against each other like lead pipes, creating a terrible racket. Covering his ears won't help.

 _Fix_ the hair? Why? Is it _broken_ somehow?

It is a situation that calls for the twist-and-snap he's perfected to escape Mother's over-affectionation. Drakken ricks his shoulders so that only the pads are touchable and claws his arms in place to keep all other organisms at bay, building up to one big, final wrest of his head so that his ponytail slips free and dangles unencumbered to his shoulders. It is much needed - it shields his vulnerable nape from enemies, and these three are rapidly approaching enemy status.

"Oh, and the scar says, 'I'm a bad man.'" Slick Bangs pitches those last four words in a squeak that sounds nothing like Drakken.

"NOT!" they all holler in perfect three-part harmony.

What? Do they think he did this to himself for aesthetic purposes? Although Drakken has to admit, it has come in handy to frighten those wet-behind-the-ears do-gooders with their clean faces and clean souls. . .

But that, apparently, is also a thing of the past. Just like getting to snap on the TV and watch it without having to pay an exorbitant amount for anything besides the local news.

Yes, four-pound cockroaches sound good. Drakken wishes with all his might for an army of mutant bugs he could sic on these fellows.

Drakken grinds his underbite - which will probably be their next target. He's exhausted, as though he's spent the day swimming his way through the _English_ channel instead of the cable roster _of_ channels. He aches from an imaginary superhero's punch, and he's in no mood to be picked over with their nano-tools.

If this continues, he will be led to either tears or murder.

"But don't worry, viewers!" Non-Geek says, in a tone so much friendlier that Drakken can't help a hopeful glance at him. He is now modeling a smile, as if he has come to pay Drakken's bail after being responsible for his arrest in the first place. "There's no villain too far gone for. . . the Evil Eye Trio!"

The chill that writhes down Drakken's spine is five degrees colder than the one he felt in the shadow of Mr. Sit-Down's substantial hind end. He tries to say, "No;" he tries to say, "Stop," but the words split apart in his throat and plunge straight toward the pit of his stomach, which already roils as though he fed it cold worms instead of cinnamon oatmeal this morning.

They surround Drakken and spirit him away like the Three Horsemen of the Apocalypse, intent on grooming him to be the Fourth.

(Which is a job Drakken would have gladly signed up for - before they slapped some kind of elitist dress code on it.)

* * *

Actually, the Evil Eye process is not nearly as torturous as Drakken was dreading.

Okay, so the scouring of his closet was a little embarrassing. The three of them slapped at least twenty identical lab coats around on the rack, their noses getting higher and more disapproving with each one - as if they _don't_ have a dozen-or-so carbon copies of _their_ signature outfits! Big Lip digs deeper; he unearths a box overflowing with machetes and mallets and maces and other assorted weaponry and raises a buttery eyebrow at Drakken. Drakken can do nothing but chuckle sheepishly.

They are, like the toilets in the home-and-plumbing section of Smarty Mart, for display purposes only. Drakken used to hang them (the weapons, not the toilets) on the walls at mathematically-calculated intervals until Shego commented, "Dr. D, I do NOT want to be around the day that thing decides to fall down and decapitate you." Much as he loathes her always-rightness, Drakken is even more loath to become a headless ghost out of children's fantasy books. Then he'd _really_ need a makeover.

(Not that he even believes in ghosts.)

So now Drakken just keeps the weapons lying around to further the perilous ambiance. Not that he'd never use them - he _is_ vicious and bloodthirsty, after all! He's simply never had the opportunity.

Drakken shoves the box back into the bowels of his closet and slumps in the corner as the Evil Eye Trio continues to cluck their tongues over his consistent wardrobe.

The lair itself also needs a makeover, they tell him. They say it is too dark, that it creates too gloomy an effect.

That is _exactly_ the point! And yet they insist on bringing in trays loaded down with paint and encouraging him to go ahead and paint the walls "a lovely light blue."

Drakken is about to call them on their hypocrisy - praising the very shade they found so hideous on his face - but then they give him a roller brush and tell him to get to work.

All of Drakken's doubts are clicked and dragged to some obscure folder. He dips the roller brush, wonderful contraption that it is, into the paint and swings it across the walls in wide, assured strokes, clean-edged and lustrous.

His exhilaration pops him back and forth from one section of wall to another, each more ripe for painting than the one before. Perhaps his trapezoids and dripping stripes and semicircles with sunbursts radiating from them aren't the most efficient way to cover surface area - a thought that skips through Drakken's brain and then back out again as soon as he catches the glint of a hidden camera.

Drakken flashes his biggest, readiest-for-prime-time grin and applies every ounce of restraint he has to not shout, "Hi, Mother!" If she sees him starring on a villain makeover show, after all, it will surely tip her off as to his true career and the time isn't yet right. She deserves to be the mother of a Supreme Emperor, not just that of a power-hungry overachiever.

Come to think of it, _will_ this episode ever be broadcast? Or will it remain stuck in the mire of Inner-Cable TV? Is this a fictional episode of a real show?

Drakken's painting grows increasingly more erratic as he ponders this minor existential crisis.

Next, the Evil Eye Trio ushers Drakken to the living room and makes him lie down on a padded board. There's a nice squishy notch at the front for him to rest his chin, though his back cries out with nothing but air to support its troublesome tendons and joints like rusted hinges of machinery.

Big Lip comes up behind Drakken and kneads his fingers into the nape of Drakken's neck. His fingernails haven't been nibbled down to nubs the way Drakken's have, and he spends several swollen seconds waiting for an anxiety attack that never comes. Under the ever-present tension of bodily contact, this touch is actually. . . soothing. Maybe the man has found a golden spot, somewhat akin to the one on Commodore Puddles's belly that always brings his dog to leg-pumping doggy bliss.

There have been several times Drakken has _meant_ to go visit a chiropractor, but it has always been. . . well, outside his price range. Just wait until he overthrows the global economy!

The hands stay like that as they continue the massage, untwisting kinks and snarls that run so deeply Drakken would have thought a surgeon would need to cut him open and manually untie the muscles (which would probably be even more obscenely expensive than a chiropractor). He is on the fast track to forgiving these men their earlier unkind words.

Big Lip grabs Drakken's left foot, his fingers cool and nimble against Drakken's bare toes. Before Drakken even has the chance to shiver, Big Lip twists his foot sharply to the right, and Drakken's entire spine rearranges itself. For a dry-mouthed moment, there is a thick trail of pain, scribbling across his eyes and burning his kidneys and drawing his airways taut so that the oxygen that goes in doesn't have much interest in coming back out.

And then it is gone, it is over, falling limp, the relief whistling and throbbing through every nerve ending.

Drakken sighs all the air from his lungs and feels himself practically melt over the side of the board. He knows a smile is staggering as though drunk across his face. His eyelids drop to half-mast.

Forgiveness isn't enough. These men should be canonized saints!

Then it's off to the kitchen - Drakken's second-favorite room in the lair, right after the lab. Non-Geek takes charge here, collecting various spices and cans and vegetables and mixing them all in a simmering pot that Drakken also gets to help stir. Eventually, through chemical magic, they've produced a tan soup whose smell reminds Drakken of both potluck dinners and _Titanium Chef_ reruns.

(Now _there's_ a show he wouldn't mind ending up on.)

Non-Geek dips a large spoon into the pot and holds it up for Drakken to taste. He takes a few tiny sips, and - gadzooks! He wishes he'd waited and coined the term _wowful_ specifically for this. He can taste five or six different flavors in there, all banding together to create something even larger and more potent than themselves.

Drakken is reluctant to swallow, to uproot it from his taste buds, but it slides down his throat as though going down a nice slick slide. His center warms, and he grins so hard that his uvula catches a draft.

It is, unfortunately, the last time he will smile for several more hours.

Slick Bangs drops Drakken into a metal-backed chair that jars his tailbone on impact. Putting their hive-mind to good use, they cluster around Drakken with the precision of a trio of falcons coordinating an airstrike. The skin under Drakken's eyes begins to flinch, and he shoots them all his toughest look - the buffoon always retreats as a _direct result_ of it!

There must be too many variables in place this time, however, because the Evil Eye Trio aren't deterred at all. Slick Bangs drapes a stiff, tablecloth-looking thing over Drakken's body and ties it behind him.

A can of hair goop is produced. Drakken hopes that they are about to study its chemical structure.

Alas, it is not to be, for Slick Bangs grabs a hairbrush and rips it impatiently through Drakken's hair-spikes. The spikes lie flat for .5 seconds before springing back into place - due to both natural curl and sheer stubbornness, Mother always said - and there they remain until a liberal amount of the hair goop slathers them.

Drakken fidgets in his uncomfortable seat, not trusting the goop's slithering texture. It feels as though his head has been doused in kerosine.

And here comes Non-Geek holding a match.

It's not, in truth, a match. It's worse. It's a pair of scissors that snaps ominously on its journey toward him.

In the space of Drakken's next breath, his special blue rubber band is whipped from his ponytail and the blades make their descent.

Drakken is too frozen to fidget anymore. He squeezes his eyes shut tight, trying not to feel the scissors snipping off hunks of his identity. Maybe it's all just a dream, a really weird nightmare, and he'll wake up come next morn and everything will be fine and he'll still have his hair. . .

After endless minutes of body heat coming too near and Drakken's internal organs clenching up, they are done - leaving his neck barren. Severed wisps thinner than cat whiskers scratch at Drakken's collar. The lair's chill wraps him in a way it didn't ten minutes ago.

 _At least the worst is over,_ Drakken thinks.

Incorrectly.

The Evil Eye Trio whisks him off into a corner and begins to _pull his clothes off_. It's far too fresh, and Drakken's unprepared, and his limbs lock down. Boy, does he wish he had a machete now, though he's not quite sure what he'd do with it. Hold it to one of their throats and demand his lab coat back?

Into Drakken's arms are thrust a change of clothes - he supposes: a crowned-shouldered top with a flowing cape attached to it and a pair of swimsuit bottoms smaller than the boxers he's currently wearing. Drakken raises a pleading look to his captors, and they seem to understand for once.

They hand him a skimpy little set of white briefs. And, mercifully, turn their backs.

Drakken wonders vaguely how they knew what size to bring.

Well, the cape is nice. Drakken's always sort of wanted a nice, regal cape to billow behind him in the breeze. Still, haven't they watched _The Incredibles_? Capes can be dangerous.

They also neglected to mention that the shirt doesn't. . . work. It's an intentional misfit that stops somewhere around his rib cage and doesn't even bother to reach for the skimpy excuse for shorts. His belly, now as naked as his neck, dents in the way the hovercraft's front bumper did after it collided with a skyscraper last month. (So his attention went astray for _one second_. . . )

Drakken has no idea whether it's a good belly or not. He just knows it is his, and it is private; it is not theirs to expose. All he can register is a ragged-nailed need to be safely tucked away in the modesty of his good old lab coat.

"Wait until they see the new you!" Slick Bangs declares.

(Shego would have some bitingly sarcastic retort here, and it would be brilliant.)

Drakken doesn't. He feels the cold pressing in from all directions - on his navel, on his neck, on the legs that are now completely available for viewing. Of course, with legs as admittedly small as his, they would want to maximize every inch of space, but. . . but . . .

He's _cold_.

It hurts just as bad as the blows Stupid Ferret Man landed on his temple, and Drakken whips his head around to avoid the shiny, reflective surface of his latest doom ray. He can't even recall what it was _supposed_ to do. Except not this. And he longs to be someplace, _any_ place, where he doesn't have to look at himself.

Or whoever this new person they've created is.

The three of them assure Drakken that he looks great, he looks wonderful, the costume will start a trend, and he carries it off perfectly, is he sure that he's forty? Drakken recognizes it as flattery, each piece of which is like a tiny marshmallow - sweet and yummy to the taste, yet without the nourishment of a meal. He remembers how he feels when he's missed a meal or two: weak-kneed, warm-ankled, ferocious in a way that could have passed for a shot of adrenaline until it nearly keels him over.

It might be preferable to his current status; he feels chilled and wilted from the inside out, like that spoiled leaf of lettuce. How can they even expect him to navigate the familiar halls of his own lair? The skin under one eye is rising in agitation, the other eye hidden behind a shroud of hair, and he doesn't dare open _that_ one and risk it being swamped by hair goop.

Non-Geek lifts Drakken's arm and stares at his armpits. (Really, of all things, though Drakken knows he shouldn't be surprised anymore.) "Wow. Whoever did your wax job only missed a few spots," he says.

Drakken sees absolutely no point in telling him that it's not a good wax job, merely his naturally endangered body hair.

"Now -" Slick Bangs takes a predatory stretch toward Drakken, who scrabbles backward, his feet searching for traction - "you must serve your guests."

" _Serve_?" The boom in Drakken's voice, usually one of his greatest prides, whistles a thin breeze, and he knows instantly he's questioned the wrong word. The one drumming between his temples like a second heartbeat is _guests_.

What, have they invited more of their friends? A whole _panel_ of judges to look him from head to toe and comment unfavorably on his gait and his posture and the sweat now pooling in these mostly-smooth armpits?

"Dinner," Slick Bangs says. His politeness is practiced, nothing more.

Drakken swallows hard so no drool will leak out. His stomach creaks, reminding him that he's hungry enough to eat a pony, if not an entire horse. Minus the hooves, of course. You could really fracture your lower mandible on those hooves, with or without the horseshoes. . .

Oh, yes, the soup! It might all be worth it just to get another mouthful of that soup, though Drakken isn't so keen on the idea of "sharing" it.

 _It'll be okay. It'll all be okay. Somehow -_

The Evil Eye Trio station themselves around Drakken in perfect triangulation. Turns out there's no need for him to have been nervous about moving, because they shuffle him along as though on the whims of some almighty producer, so that Drakken barely touches the ground at all. They chatter away, more speaking roles than he has ears to listen to, carrying him farther and farther away from the security of his lab and any instruments or concoctions that could be an advantage.

 _Death ray. Memory wipe. Laser alarm system. I need all of them!_

 _I'd settle for_ one _of them!_

Big Lip drops a satin grip on the back of Drakken's unguarded neck. "Are you ready to face your audience, Dr. Drakken?"

"Yes." Drakken at least has the presence of mind to lie. And under those typical circumstances that have already fled for the day, it wouldn't _be_ a lie. He _loves_ having an audience. Been practicing waves and good-natured duckings of the head for the grand and wonderful day when he will finally part an adoring crowd on the way to his hard-earned throne.

But this is closer to his recurring nightmare of having to give a book report to his seventh-grade Language Arts class while in his underwear.

The door to the kitchen is swept open, and Drakken is ridden through on a wave of sophistication he can't even absorb.

An additional chair is pulled up next to a small, purplish table, and on it rests an old radio of Drakken's. Smooth, jazzy music lilts from its speakers. Everything that even vaguely resembled clutter has been quietly removed from the premises, and Drakken takes a moment to reassure himself that he _will_ be getting it back as soon as they return to reality.

To Drakken's immense relief, there are only three people seated at the table, bowls and spoons already planted in front of them. To his horror, they are Kim Possible, the buffoon, and. . . Shego.

"Presenting - the new and improved Dr. Drakken!" Non-Geek cries.

Those words, delivered in announcer's fashion, make Drakken almost forget the humiliation. A spark hops from the left hemisphere of his brain to the right, jump-starting his genius once more. A new plan barrels in through pictures of himself running to the kitchen and back, using the trips to disentangle the Pan-Dimensional Vortex Inducer's cords from the television's, slipping them back into their proper wiring, and reconfiguring the settings to send them all back home, where he will arrive back at his _real_ lair with his hair and his outfit and his dignity intact.

Next he'll call the cable company and lobby for that dunderhead who installed his cable package to be fired. Honestly, the incompetence!

That settled, it is much easier to pose and for a minute almost enjoy being put on a display, his shoulder span exaggerated by the crests on his new shirt, legs straightened with a new plan. Drakken makes sure to stand regally and regard his audience with untouchable confidence.

Kim Possible looks back at him; Drakken expects to see a smirk dividing her mouth, but instead it's coiled back in disgust.

With these men? Or at the fact that _she_ is now forced to stare at _his_ midriff? Probably the latter, especially considering that her pitying smirk was right there when he was. . . ahem. . . relieved of his trousers a few all-too-short weeks ago. She's certainly seen more Drakken than she cares to.

Drakken's cheeks blotch pink, and he jerks his gaze over to the buffoon. The child has managed to keep track of his pants for however long that makeover actually was, and his features are wadded into a frown. His head wags slowly back and forth.

From the buffoon's pocket pokes a smear of pink baldness. The rodent arranges its paws in the shape of a picture frame and peers through the resulting quadrilateral at Drakken. Its whiskers give a series of rapid - and clearly negative - twitches.

Drakken fashions an arms-over-chest fold and for a second he believes the nano-sleeves wil literally cut off his circulation. It's a fresh type of pain. He is accustomed, though not adjusted, to being ignored, mocked, by foes of all sizes, but not to being stuffed into a role too small for him.

And then there is Shego. Drakken thinks he can't bring himself to look at her, and yet his eyes snap right to her as though it is their sworn duty. She didn't witness the pants incident, only its barrel-covered aftermath, which was more than enough for Drakken. She is his closest friend and his most trusted employee, but she _is_ still a girl, and he isn't eager for her reaction to his near-nudity, be it acceptance or revulsion or anything in between.

Shego's face spasms from the jawline upward. She's either breaking the record for the world's deepest, most secretive fit of laughter - or preparing to vomit.

Either one makes Drakken's insides feel swarmed with piranhas. (Or is the single-form still just _piranha_? He never did know. . . ) He wills Shego to whirl on the Evil Eye Trio, to make some sort of quip along the lines of, "Never take fashion advice from a man in tights."

That's presuming tights are "out" for men this season. Drakken hasn't caught an episode of _The Style File_ since it was restricted to Cable Access Only.

Ah. Irony.

And Shego's silent except for the tiny squeaks coming from her nostrils.

Drakken looks away from her, down at his legs, every inch offered up like an advertisement for pastel toothpicks. It isn't even fall yet, and they're shaking like a blizzard is battering them from up north. He tries to press them together to warm them without upsetting the Speedo's insecure hold on his hips.

A mad scientist reduced to keeping tabs on these dinky squares of fabric standing between him and a charge of indecent exposure? Why, it's disgraceful!

Sick of the sight of his knobby knees and the itch of no longer fitting into himself, Drakken chances one more glance upward.

Shego has turned her back on the whole scene, and Kim Possible's eyes have started rolling yet again. The buffoon sits beside her, his stare going off into the distance, and then bends down with his hands cupped around what doesn't prove to be much of a whisper. "I liked him better before," he says, and it's as clear as if spoken right into a megaphone.

A sensation like the back adjustment tempers Drakken's shorn neck, and it is the one thing that still fits.

 _Yes. I liked me better before, too._


	32. Into the Unknown

**~That awkward moment when you enter puberty and there's no one to explain it to you.**

 **Timeline: Drew is twelve.~**

Drew Lipsky crouches at the intersection of two brick walls. If the school building is a body and the walls are the limbs, this place is the elbow - no one will think to look for him here.

For once Drew is grateful for the still-haven't-grown-into-them-yet folds of Eddy's hand-me-downs. They make it much easier to conceal the copy of _Human Growth and Reproduction_ that he slowly unrolls from his T-shirt.

Today has _not_ been a good day at Middleton Junior High. Gym class alone would've sunken it with its cruel chin-up challenge. Drew's scrawny arms can barely hold him aloft, and dangling there for long is an invitation for his gym shorts to slide down the rest of his non-muscles and fall to his sneakers. He learned both those things the hard way _last_ year.

His English teacher - the one with the face like a raisin, all dried-up and sour-sweet - assigned a book report. It has to be a hundred pages long (the book, not the report). Drew offered to present a detailed paper on binomial theorem instead. This was denied.

But none of it could compare to the disaster of health class last period.

It's a new year, a brand-new curriculum, one that's being introduced into schools all over the _country_! Supposedly, it will explain this whispered-about thing called "puberty."

And not a moment too soon, as far as Drew's concerned. Girls have parts they didn't have last year, and they provoke feelings _he_ didn't have last year.

Obviously not the same new feelings they give Eddy, who's just served a week's detention for getting caught snooping around the girls' locker room. Drew is just dying of curiosity - well, not actually _dying_ , but it's pretty painful curiosity. Why are they changing and how? That nice girl Julie stopped wearing pigtails over the summer and shot up a head taller than Drew and seems to have mutated into some intimidating creature overnight. Someone he can't have conversations about the solar system with anymore.

This class, then, is a very good thing. The only other scientific methods of figuring it out would be observing, which grown-ups called _staring_ , or asking the girls himself, which grown-ups called _prying_. And Drew has a feeling they'd be inappropriate even without the adult labels.

The boys were perched on the edges of their seats, feet fluttering against the carpet, while the textbooks were passed out. Most of the girls hunched together and talked in vacuum-sweeper-type hisses. Drew could see Julie, in the front row, playing with the ends of her red hair. He felt sorry for her.

A teacher-hand clamped down on Drew's shoulder then, and he jerked up to see Mr. Giovanni. Drew's heart instantly felt sick, truly sick, barfing-sick, the way it used to back in elementary when he wasn't sure whether he'd remembered to bring his permission slip or not.

Mr. Giovanni pulled Drew to the back of the room, as if to not make a scene, though every eye in the place was already fixed on them. Drew could feel them poking him like thistles. Lost in Mr. Giovanni's shadow, he listened as Mr. Giovanni told him much-too-nicely that Drew's mother had called and requested he sit out this class.

Mr. Giovanni didn't have the quietest whisper. One of the jocks in the back row picked it up and choked on a laugh and sent the whole class into a group yowl.

There was so much chaos and commotion then, no one noticed when Drew smuggled his textbook under his shirt on his way out the doorway.

Which he _does_ feel bad about, but come _on_ \- this book would be rightfully his if Mom hadn't interfered! These are things that must be done in the name of science. And he's bound to find something in here that'll unlock this mystery.

The book feels off-limits enough that it could scorch his skin, like the ancient artifact in that movie Mom doesn't know he's seen. Drew touches only the corners of the pages as he thumbs through until he finds the word he's been searching for - _female_.

 _The female body is perfectly designed to accompany the needs of a growing fetus. Attached to the mother with an umbilical cord. . ._

Blah. This is nothing he doesn't already know.

Nose scrunched in disgust, Drew grabs another corner when the second large hand of the day comes down and smothers his own.

Drew screams - a sound that squeaks into several different pieces. It's the jocks - well, not _all_ the jocks, just Carl Thompson and a few of his closest friends - but that's more than enough. They've floated in as easily and silently as the fall leaves blow to the ground.

"Whatcha readin', _Drewbie_?" Carl asks.

"Nothing!" Drew shoves the book behind his back. The finger that adjusts his glasses has been commanded not to shake. Surely this group can't smell his fear - they're not dogs, only human adolescents like him.

Next thing he knows, Carl has wrenched both of Drew's arms behind his back and in one leaf-flicking moment has Drew wedged between the school building and the grass below. One knee scrapes open against the brick, and Drew whimpers into his tucked-in lips. He keeps discovering new types of pain.

It would be scientifically fascinating if it didn't _hurt_ so much.

"Ooooh," one of Carl's cronies says now. "I've seen that book before."

They throw back their heads and howl like a bunch of fear-sniffing wolves.

Drew performs his slippery-soap trick and squirts out of Carl's grasp. "Give that back!" he shouts. He lunges for the book, but he hasn't hit his growth spurt yet and Carl has.

" _Human Growth and Reproduction_ ," Carl reads. He hooks the textbook down to Drew's eye level. "Isn't this a bit grown-up for a little girl like you?"

"I'm a little _boy_!" Drew cries. "I mean - no, wait! I'm not little! I mean - _nnnggh_!" He makes another dive, and it's about as effective as spitting at a blizzard, as Mom would say. He's fenced in from behind by Jason and Alexander, who each grab an arm like a pair of cafeteria monitors - or dungeon guards.

Carl flips pages lazily. "I bet you're _reallllll_ curious to know what's in this book, Drewbie."

Drew thrusts his toe into the dusty dirt below him. If he hits it at just the right angle, he can produce a face-spray that might save his skin. "A good scientist is always curious," he says, his jaw tight.

"Unless his _mommy_ decides he can't be," Jason says. His laughter jerks Drew's left arm back and forth.

Carl nods to his friends, and as clearly as if they've been issued an order, they drop Drew and let him plunk to the ground. He lies there for a moment, considering staying down and surrendering, hoping the whole time that Eddy will come to his rescue.

Except - no. Ever since he finished detention, Eddy won't be caught dead hanging around school any longer than he has to.

"Where are you taking my book?" Drew mumbles into the dirt.

"What?" Alexander asks. His innocence is more phony than pro wrestling. "That a mystery you won't be able to solve, _Nancy_ Drew?"

Drew internally curses them all, to the best of his sheltered ability.

"Oh, I bet Principal Bowers will be pretty interested to know you still had this," Carl says. He leers down at Drew like a hunter come to deliver the killing blow. "And that you _doodled_ in it."

For an instant, Drew is even more horrified before it occurs to him that Mom is the only one who uses _doodle_ to mean. . . well, what it meant in his toilet-training days. He pulls himself to his feet and examines the blood-and-dirt combination smeared on his injured knee.

That's all the time it takes for Carl to toss the book to Alexander, and then they're playing Monkey in the Middle with it. Simple mathematics tells Drew he can't get it back, but he still has to _try_.

"You. . . can't. . . prove. . . that's. . . mine!" Drew huffs a word with each bounce.

"Oh-huh." Carl gives the front cover a triumphant flap open. Letters and groups of letters on the title page have been boxed in with pencil and given the atomic number that corresponds to the element they symbolize. Drew feels his gravel-bitten cheeks flame.

The group does its wolf impression again as Carl gives Drew a pat on the back that sprawls him back into the dirt. One particularly large chin-pimple that's been sizzling all day lands first, and Drew sees sparklers when he blinks.

Someone's foot grinds into Drew's back as their strong footsteps retreat. Alexander calls over his shoulder, "Too bad you'll never find out what turned your face into a pizza, _Drew_ bie!"

"Oh, sure!" Drew hollers back. "No one's ever thought of comparing pimples to pepperoni before! You're so origi -" His voice splits under the weight of tears he knows he can't cry. But he has no power, not even over them, and they insist on slithering from his eyes and dropping onto the weeds anyway.

Drew slaps them away as soon as he can breathe again and rolls over so he can be seated on his backside, the conventional way, arms linked around his legs, injured kneecap poking up in smears of brown and red. He glares at the nook in the building that failed to keep him safe. It's not an elbow anymore. It's an armpit, and he hates it.

Speaking of armpits - didn't he _just_ shower this morning?

Drew feels a lump in his throat.

Actually, physically _feels_ it. From the outside!

A fresh disaster. Is he growing new parts, too? How will he learn how to use them?

Not to mention the queasiness in his heart that shouldn't be there, because it's not even part of the digestive tract. His body just started to make sense, and now _this_!

He needs more knowledge.

Knowledge, after all, is power.

* * *

Drew stops in at home just long enough to dump his backpack and lunchbox and tell Mom, "I'm going to Eddy's!" He has it all calculated, right down to the individual minute - how long he needs to be out of the house to ensure he's not there when Principal Bowers calls, and precisely when he'll need to return in order to not miss dinner or worry Mom.

Still, it doesn't feel like a victory as Drew drags his feet down the three blocks to Eddy's house. Whether he's there or not, the principal is going to call his mother, and he'll probably get a detention himself. He's never had a detention in his _life_! And the detention teacher probably won't be cooperative in Drew's search for knowledge, either.

Apparently he's not _supposed_ to know. Too grown-up.

Grown-up - that's exactly what he wants to _be_ , only nobody will _let_ him!

It only gets better when Drew rings Eddy's doorbell and his cousin flings open the front door with a delighted shout of, "Cousin Drew!" Drew could swear Eddy grows like the Kelp Forest. Okay, maybe not a foot a day, but he does seem to get bigger and broader and higher above Drew's head almost every time Drew sees him.

"Come on in, cuz," Eddy says. "I'll getcha a root beer."

Drew smiles for what might be the first time today as he follows his cousin inside. Root beer's too expensive and too "junky" for his mom to buy.

Eddy's house isn't a mansion or anything, but his family must be pretty rich because they have their own color TV and their own record player. Eddy throws a record on it now and scratches the needle across it so that some foundation-shaking rock song begins. The hailstorm drumbeat that feels painful and wrong in his own room pulses with the forbidden in Eddy's living room.

Between that and Eddy's admiring gaze on him, Drew's saggy, still-several-sizes-too-big clothes actually begin to look cool and rebellious.

At least they leave room to grow.

Without another word, Eddy lumbers down the hall to his room. Drew does his best to swagger after him. It's hard - his oversize black sneakers don't catch right on the shaggy carpet.

Eddy leaves the door cracked open a bit so the music can still thump into his room - his room with the car-print bedsheets and the lamp shaped like a football and the desk cluttered with sports trophies. It isn't an adult's room, but you could tell at just a glance that belongs to someone who's outweighed Drew since second grade.

His glasses dig into the bridge of his nose, tighter than usual.

Eddy plops down next to the window and tugs it open an inch or two. The air that comes in reminds Drew of ice cream melting over apple pie - warm with trickles of cold in it - and it smells like school buses and trampled-on leaves.

"You bring your chemistry set?" Eddy says.

Something sparks inside Drew at the word _chemistry_ , even as he has to say, "No. I forgot."

Eddy grunts. "Too bad. I was hopin' we could make a couple bombs or somethin'."

For a long minute, Drew doesn't respond. Of _course_ that's it. Of course Eddy won't treat chemistry with the respect it deserves. His interest only extends to "crushing" things and "blowin' somethin' up."

Still, as much as Drew sort of wants to blame him for it, he can't. There are times when he daydreams about leveling the gym or pouring acid into the locker room's showerheads, refreshing the jerk-jocks on what it means to hurt. Usually, those thoughts run off fast - "fleeting," Drew thinks they're called - but every now and then, they curl up and make themselves right at home under his skin.

Drew flaps his arms around now, his short sleeves swelling like parachutes, to see if he can send the feeling away. "No, my mom would _kill_ me if we vaporized the garage again. But there _is_ this one really neat experiment I've been hoping to do for awhile. It'll help you determine if a substance is an acid or a base. All you need to do is -"

"Dude, that is what _I'm_ talkin' about!" Eddy points, and it isn't at Drew.

It's at a truck whose tires easily reach over Drew's head, growling its way down the street as if it's chasing something. Even its front bumper (or grille, or one of those other words Eddy's always saying and Drew's never paying attention to) parts like a snarling mouth. Eddy's face is one big light bulb as he gazes at it.

"I _gotta_ get me one of them," Eddy says.

Drew shakes his head. "You can't. You're not old enough."

It isn't meant as an insult, and Eddy doesn't take it as one. Eddy's never wasted time sulking, anyway. "Nah, but just wait 'til I _am_. Soon as I get my license and graduate, I'm gonna burn right outta this town. Never come back. Seriously!"

Eddy digs into his pocket, comes up with two Tootsie Rolls probably leftover from last Halloween, and offers one to Drew, who accepts it. His braces are scheduled to be clamped on three weeks from Saturday. Who knows when he'll get his next chance to gum up his mouth without it suffering a five-day stain?

Drew curls against the window. For once, he understands sloppy-talking Eddy perfectly. He's never been more anxious for a clean getaway. He could do it, too, could leave Middleton behind in the dust and never miss anything about it. Not even Mom, not after she humiliated him in front of the whole class by holding knowledge out of his reach like the snack he isn't supposed to have before suppertime.

An idea springs into Drew's brain then like one of those arcade moles, and he has to whack it with a hammer before it drops down again. "Eddy-did-you-have-Health-Class-today?" he blurts.

There. It's out. Eddy's about the least-good source Drew can imagine, but today has scientifically proven that he's in no place to be picky.

 _Just give me a hint. Just one clue, and maybe I can work the rest out myself! I'm smart enough -_

"Yeah," Eddy says. "And I don't get what all the fuss was about. All it was was a big rally about why we shouldn't use drugs even if our friends are doin' it, all that junk."

Drew sighs, and all his hope seems to leave with the carbon dioxide. Another Knowledge Road blocked off by police tape.

"It wasn't even interesting until they showed the picture of somebody's lung who smoked," Eddy continues. "Then all the babes almost puked, so that was kinda cool."

Part of Drew wants to ask what a _babe_ is, but the question gets stuck in the Tootsie Roll, and he can't manage to pry it loose.

Yes, he remembers the black lung picture from _his_ rally a year or two back. It was fascinating, decayed like a moldy slice of bread, far enough away where you couldn't smell it or connect its horrors to any part of reality.

It certainly doesn't have anything to do with Drew's reality. Come to think of it, he doesn't even really _have_ any friends to offer him drugs, unless you count Eddy. Except Eddy already tried smoking once, three-puffs-and-a-puke's worth, and he hadn't liked it at all, and the two of them had taken a saliva oath never to tell anyone about it. (Eddy wanted it to be a blood oath, but Drew talked him out of it - his mother practically has satellite radar when it comes to Drew bleeding, and it's not an activity he particularly enjoys anyway.)

And even though Eddy's got his own Tootsie Roll parked between his front teeth like some expensive cigar, Drew knows he'll probably never put any of that garbage into his body again. Eddy has little pockets of smartness that most people never see.

"But back to cars," Eddy says. "I'm thinkin' monster truck, dude. Soon as I'm sixteen. Seriously!"

" _Monster_ truck?" Drew pictures a car from _The Flintstones_ , only powered by dinosaurs' feet instead of cavemen's.

"Like that thing that just went by." Eddy strokes the window's glass as if it's a baby bunny.

The music's beat sways the floor under Drew. He anchors his fingers in his shoelaces. "Like your parents would ever buy you one of those," he says.

Eddy grins. "So? I can always hotwire one."

That's a term Drew _has_ looked up, and it sticks dryly to the roof of his mouth, especially with Eddy acting like it's a big joke. "The police would put you in jail for that," he squawks, hating his vocal cords.

"Yeah. And I heard they beat kids up in jail." The joke evaporates from Eddy's eyes as he squints them at Drew. "Do they, cuz?"

Great. A question someone's trusted him to answer, and all Drew can do is throw up his hands and say, "I don't know." He shrugs. "I've never been. And I don't plan to go."

Then again, he _is_ about to be sentenced to his first detention. The first step into a lifetime of crime, Mom called it as soon as it happened to Eddy.

Drew bites his Tootsie Roll in half. The top part tips onto his tongue and sweetens it. The bottom part falls to the carpet, clings for its life, and finally comes back up hopelessly encrusted with hair and carpet fuzz.

He hurls it into the trash can with all the might that isn't good enough for PE. Eddy and his dino-trucks won't be any help. No, give him a plane, a little one-passenger plane that can soar over everyone's heads and never have to touch the ground.

He wants _out_.

* * *

At precisely 6:05, Drew leaves Eddy's house and starts home for dinner. The walk is long. He hears his mom's voice in every whine of a weed-eater. Every single cardinal that chirps down from the trees seems to be saying, _De-TEN-TEN-tion. De-TEN-TEN-tion._

And each sidewalk crack he steps over feels like it's doing a full analysis of him . . . and coming back with nothing good. He's smellier now when he showers, and blemishes have broken out across his forehead, nose, and chin; but his voice hasn't budged from its high-pitched squeak, and his facial hair remains unswervingly light - as if his body is waffling between childhood and adolescence, acquiring only the worst of each.

Drew slips in the unlocked front door and promptly trips over the backpack he left sprawled in the entryway. He rights himself and hefts his backpack toward the out-of-the-way corner where Mom always insists he leave it. It's heavier with the one textbook it _isn't_ carrying. He's sorry he didn't listen to her, and not just because his toes hurt.

The house smells like spicy-and-sweet breaded fish - one of Mom's best dinners - with the thickness of tartar sauce on the side. And it's strangely quiet.

With a hopeful sniff, Drew steps over to examine the pan on the stove. _That's_ when he hears his mother's voice, the rise-and-fall that always means she's on the phone, filtering down from the tall, narrow staircase in the hall

Drew's stomach sinks in mid-grumble. He must have timed it wrong. Miscalculated. Principal Bowers is on the phone with his mom _right now_ and he's walked right into his own doom.

His stupid, _stupid_ body - without his permission - throws itself closer to the wall, one ear pressed against the wood.

"...just don't know what to do, Linda," Mom's saying.

Principal Bowers is a man. Whatever his first name is, it isn't Linda. That's one of Mom's friends from church.

Drew's relief lasts about five seconds before Mom's next word hiccups a little on its way out. Fighting not to cry. And only halfway succeeding.

"I know he needs to find out _some_ how. But I hate the thought of it being in a. . . a public classroom, filled with _girls_ and - and _drooling_ boys!"

Drew frowns as he backs away. He knows for a fact that he's the only boy in his grade who physically drools over science.

"And Lord knows I can't have the talk with him myself." There's another sob-pause. "Oh, this would be so much easier if Richard were still here."

Drew yanks his stinging hands away from the hot stove only to find they weren't touching it.

It's the first time all year he's heard his dad's name. He's shoved the memory of the man to some dusty old corner where thoughts go to grow mold and rot. . .

. . . which his dad might be doing now himself, for all Drew knows. Two years after the letter Drew sent to the president, even _he_ and the whole darn Secret Service haven't been able to locate Dad, dead or alive. He's pulled off a vanishing act too perfect for any ordinary human being, unless -

 _Sometimes a lack of test results can actually help you narrow your options._

Of course! Maybe his father is secretly a super-secret spy who would put his family in jeopardy if he ever contacted them again. That would explain so much.

Still, his dad could have planned ahead - Spider-Man's parents did - maybe written him a note and stuck it in a safe with the label "What To Do In Case Of Puberty."

Then Mom wouldn't _have_ to have this Talk with him, which she pronounced " _the_ talk" like villains in Eddy's action movies say " _the_ weapon." As if the world will go up in smoke if it isn't handled properly.

Drew slides down the length of the wall and pulls his shirt over his head to block out his mom's near-tears. His collar comes back smeared with something too oily and tender to belong to a little boy.

And too embarrassing to present as evidence to his mom.

* * *

The sweet-and-spicy fish is too spicy tonight. In every bite, Drew can taste his mother's disappointment, Carl's taunts, and his own sweat.

Still, it's better than the taste that springs up when Mom says, "Drewbie, I need to talk to you," after dinner, as if the roof of his mouth has started to perspire, too.

Drew follows her into the living room and sinks slowly down onto a limp couch cushion. He slides down a little, and he wonders if it could actually swallow him up, wonders whether that would be such a bad thing compared to whatever's coming next. Possibilities are skipping through his head - detention, suspension, expulsion - and then Mom's clearing her throat and it's the exact moment when the nurse is pushing on the end of the needle to sharpen it and you're begging her to give you the shot already and get it over with.

"I got a call from your principal today," Mom says.

Drew shuts his eyes and waits for her words to turn shrill and bombard him like little pellets of freezing rain.

But they don't. Even though they screech a little, sort of the way the monster truck's tires did, they don't have the edge to them that marks Very Big Trouble.

"He said you took your Health textbook with you when you left the classroom?" Mom settles on the couch beside him with a sigh. "Drewbie, sugar, I'm so sorry. I didn't mean to embarrass you - "

 _But you do! Every single day of my life!_ Drew wants to exclaim, but if he does he knows his mom will cry. And seeing Mom cry is like watching a chemical fire _he_ started blaze out of control.

". . . but I didn't want you to learn about the birds and the bees in such a _public_ setting," Mom says.

Birds? Bees? He already knows about those. He took biology last year. It's _human_ bodies that are giving him trouble now.

"So what's my punishment going to be?" Drew blurts.

Mom blinks super-fast over the tears that start to form, and Drew sits there wishing black lungs on Carl and his friends. "There's no _punishment_. Baby, no one is _mad_ at you."

"Really?"

"Really," Mom says. "Curiosity is very natural at this age. Especially for a smart little scientist like my Drewbie."

She reaches across the couch and ruffles his hair, and Drew lets her, only because of what she's just said. He wants to master space and time so he can pause them and stay forever in this spot where he's understood and forgiven.

"That's why I've made a call to your uncle." Mom tips Drew's chin up so they can look eye-to-eye - or lens-to-lens, in their case. "He's going to talk to you and Eddy tomorrow."

"About. . . changes?" Drew asks. He can't say _puberty_ to his mother, or he _will_ go up in flames and probably take the couch with him.

"Yes, dear. About changes. You're old enough to know now."

She sounds like she's trying to convince herself more than anything. As man of the house, Drew's obligated to grab her hand and squeeze it to comfort her. Her fingers are soft with lotion, her nails short and pretty - not painted today, so he can see the little white semicircles that grow up from the bottom.

And for the moment, he's comforted too.

* * *

Health class, it turns out, is only going to be held on Tuesdays and Thursdays. That means the next day, all Drew has to suffer through are the spitballs on the bus ride and the gym-jeers and the feet stuck out to trip him between classes.

Not to mention picking out a book for his report. Drew decides he might as well choose a book he at least has a chance of enjoying and heads away from the abridged classics over to the nonfiction section.

There on the third shelf down is a thick hardback book, glossy with its own newness, called _Everything You've Ever Wanted to Know About Supernovas_. Drew lunges for it, the spine wonderfully rigid in his grasp, and then notices someone else is grasping it, too, their thumb only a millimeter away from his.

A thumb that has a cute little freckle just above the knuckle.

Drew swallows hard, glances upward. It's Julie.

His feet weld to the floor. Last year, he could've yanked it away from her and yelped, "Give it, Julie! I saw it first!" But now she's standing there and her hair is all loose and straight like all the best scientific instruments of measure, and her eyelids sort of glisten unnaturally, and he's so relieved she's still interested in astronomy, and if he stares at her any longer, he'll start assessing her body's changes, and he doesn't want to do that, not at all.

Drew pops his hand away from hers and snatches the next book over, a short one about Pluto that he's read precisely twenty-eight times, and he sprints for the checkout counter before she can see him blush. Back out in the hallway, he notices with his peripheral vision - the scientific way of saying _out of the corner of his eye_ \- that she has checked out the supernova book after all.

A strange thrill goes through him.

* * *

"Hey, cuz!" Eddy hangs his arms over the front of the bus seat where Drew is _trying_ to get the letters to stay linear on the page. "My dad said yer comin' home with me today. Gonna have a man-to-man chat or somethin'."

This is it, then. _The_ Talk. The one with world-destroying capacity.

It takes too long to get to Eddy's stop, but not long enough. Drew counts up the seconds, and then the bus is gasping to a stop and its doors squeak open and Eddy takes the short steps in one leap. Drew files out behind him, hugging _Spotlight on Pluto_ to his chest, a chest that seems to be shriveling even more at the thought of his uncle with the shoulders like a set of football pads.

Even though Drew's been over to Eddy's house so many times that he's lost count, when Eddy bangs the front door open and walks in, Drew feels as though they're plunging into the unknown, an abyss out past Pluto itself. He steps cautiously through the doorway, half-expecting the gravity to have been turned off.

It hasn't, of course. It's the same old house - only there's no music playing today. The whole place is silent and solemn, like it's got a purpose.

To his own surprise, Drew appreciates this.

He glances at Eddy, who shrugs and hollers, "Dad! I'm home!"

The kitchen door opens, and Eddy's dad strides out into the parlor. He looks even bigger and tanner than Drew remembered. "Boys! Just in time!" he says. "Come in. Make yourselves comfy. Have a seat."

Drew's wobbly knees are grateful for the offer. He drops to the floor and folds his legs criss-cross applesauce and folds his hands neatly like the good kid he really is deep down.

Eddy plops beside him and follows Drew's example, the picture of cluelessness. Drew himself steals another peripheral glance at his uncle. He's never known the man to be nervous before, but now he's wiping his palms on his thighs and licking at the inside of his cheek like it has a funny texture.

"So, you boys are in junior high now. Growing up fast," his uncle says. His voice is as stiff as the pair of dress pants Drew had to wear for school picture day. "And I'm sure you've noticed that you - and some of your classmates - are starting to, well, to _change_ a little. Grow in. . . certain ways."

Eddy nods, sparkly-eyed. Drew lowers his gaze to his lap so he won't have to focus on his uncle's hairy ankles and be jealous on top of everything.

"Now, a lot of those changes may be hard to go through, but they're very, very important," his uncle says. "They're what will someday make it possible for babies to be born."

Drew grips Pluto tighter.

"Babies!" Eddy bellows. He squints at his dad. "What do babies have to do with any of this?"

"Great question!" Drew's uncle claps like a game show host. "You see, boys, it all begins with something called _hormones_. . . "

* * *

What follows is a scientifically sound walk-through of what's changing and why it's changing and how it all leads up to an event that makes perfect biological sense.

It's the longest half-hour of Drew's life.

Eddy periodically calls, "What? No way!" or "Seriously?" or "You're makin' that up!"

Drew himself stays nearly completely silent, only squawking a "yes" now and then when his uncle thinks to ask, "Do you understand, Drew?"

 _I understand. It's all clear. You - you can stop talking now._

"So that's what happens when a boy begins to turn into a young man. And someday soon it'll happen to you. Both of you," his uncle says, as if someone paid him to say that last line. He claps again, and Drew notices his uncle's shirt is almost as sweat-soaked as his own. "All right. Run along and play now."

It takes Drew several seconds to remember how standing works.

Eddy shoots to his feet, yells, "Thanks, Dad!" and bounds down the hall, stumbling over his supersize feet like a St. Bernard puppy Drew saw at the park once. Drew makes some sort of noise - "meep" or "gleep" or "nnngeep" - and shuffles along behind Eddy, suddenly painfully aware of every scrap of scum between his toes.

As soon as they reach Eddy's room again, Eddy pulls a ball from under his bed - black and white, so it's probably for soccer - and bounces it off his knee five times in a row, six, seven, eight. "Can you _believe_ that?" Eddy says, for the entire solar system to hear. "All that stuff he said? Pretty crazy, right? I mean, you think he was for real?"

Drew doesn't answer. Can't. What's wallowing in his throat is half wheeze and half squeak and it threatens to never stop, not ever. He stretches his arms, apish in their length but without the gorilla strength Eddy's getting, out backward and locks his fingers together behind his head.

 _How am I ever going to look at my mom again?_


	33. The Holiday Spirit

**~In which Drakken attends a nerd party. Although it's not nearly as eventful as the one he'll attend in the next chapter of _Sky Blue, Ocean Blue_ (*cough* shameless self-promotion *cough*). **

**The occasional non-word is meant to capture his voice.~**

The red-berried wreath is the first ornamentation Dr. Drakken's ever seen on their plainclothes door.

Of course, he realizes after a second, it makes perfect sense. It is only a week and three days until Christmas - an undecorated door would stand out from all the other establishments on the street, therefore ruining the whole point of having an Unmarked Inconspicuous Door in the first place. No one must know that what lies beneath teems with dedicated heroes and is accessible only via a network of tubes that would stymie the most dedicated lab rat.

Okay, so that last part isn't entirely true anymore. They _did_ just install a special underground elevator, which is a good thing as far as Drakken's concerned - the tube arrangement, while dramatic, was also a little sickening.

It is this elevator that Drakken heads to now, removing his glove and pressing his hand flat against the control-panel interface, widening his eye so the light can get a nice flash of it. Once his handprints and retinas are approved - _ooh_ , he _loves_ being approved, and in his own body, to boot! - the elevator's doors swing open with that marvelous _dling_ , as if someone has just won five thousand dollars on a game show.

The sound tickles the veins in Drakken's feet until he might as well be standing on a box of dull pencils. He channels it by hopping from one foot to the other, dancing and wriggling while humming "Jingle Bells" to himself and to whoever is monitoring the elevator traffic tonight.

There's a steep plunge at the end before the elevator bungees back to align with the platform. It's a sensation that always used to rattle Drakken, but now he associates it with the closeness of this place, this place his genius has come to call home.

Drakken straightens his shoulder pads and strolls from the elevator, taking a moment to remind himself that he is welcome here. He comes from a life where places like these have been habitually denied to him.

And yet despite the attitude of some of Global Justice's agents - in particular, one young upstart named Will Du, who embodies all of Kim Possible's most annoying attributes to the tenth power - no enmity falls over Drakken as the elevator doors lock behind him again. He takes a breath ripe with chemical scents and brand-new dreams and it makes all his former lairs, as many fond memories as he has of them, look about as inviting as a prison cell.

Yes, that's it. It's nearly Christmas, and his war is over. He will never have to see a cell again - at least not from the inside, not in the barred shadows when the sun _did_ deign to peek in through the windows.

The thought never ceases to overwhelm Drakken, and he blinks quickly to prevent his eyes from over-lubricating.

"Dr. Drakken." Dr. Director, his boss, strides toward him with her usual thermometer-straight posture. She sticks out a hand for Drakken to shake, which he does, enthusiastically, between the both of his. "Good to see you."

Drakken's brain slides that into the file where he always catalogs kindness. "Good to see you, too!"

He rocks up on his toes to see over her head, which rises almost as high as his. He can't wait to see Professor Ricardo and Dr. Tarrow and tell the friendlier agents how repairs are coming on the Immobilizer 2000. . .

Dr. Director lets out a chucklette - a miniature chuckle, stopped midway up her throat. "Come on. I might as well walk you to the banquet room."

If she were Shego, she would add, _Before you pee your pants._

Drakken trails Dr. Director down the hall, following a route he is memorizing the way Englists memorize poetry, the way Drakken himself has memorized the periodic table. Each doorway he passes is a different element, tucked in its tidy square, always the same atomic weight, always the same atomic measure. Every intersection is an atom-gathering where science can swear to you what types of molecules will be formed.

He is congratulating himself for that metaphor as they pass the first bend, where motionless guards are practically glued to their assigned screens. Such businesslike expressions are attached to their faces that they resemble automatons, but Drakken goes ahead and waves anyway because they tend to wave back.

They do, and a strange sensation strikes Drakken, like dropping a bowling ball on your foot, only with just the pressure, not the pain. "Do they have to stay here?" he whispers as best he can to Dr. Director. "And skip the party?"

Dr. Director does not mock his concern with a smile. "The sentries will take shifts just as they do every day, Dr. Drakken. Each of them will get a chance to spend a while at the party, if he or she chooses. I know it's not _ideal_ , but we cannot afford to compromise our security."

"Indeed we cannot," Drakken agrees in a tone he hopes is as level and grave as hers.

He gives the sentries one last wave and heads back down the path storing itself in his long-term memory - does that make it a physical Memory Lane? The high, lofted ceilings stand unchanged and stoic, as though they refuse to compromise their protective stances as well. But almost everything else has been _garnished_ \- ooh, good word! - so that it appears businesslike yet light-hearted, which is just how Drakken's always liked to think of himself.

Tinsel tacked up around the outlines of doorways. Side tables decorated with real pine-cones that still smell of the trees that dropped them. In the window of one stockroom, what Drakken recognizes (thanks to that one kid - oh, what is his name?) as a _menorah_.

Drakken's toes cry out to be bounced on again. He obliges them, his mind a fondue fountain, gushing pictures of his mother and Snowman Hank, sugar cookies and multicolored lights, gift wrap and peppermint and holiday truces.

The banquet room is a medium-large offshoot of their larger, but decidedly less handsome, cafeteria. Dr. Director _is_ smiling now as she enters, and the first thing Drakken sees when he gallops in behind her is an _actual_ fondue pot. It presides over a table stocked high with goodies, salty and sweet and everything in between.

Drakken's stomach growls, almost louder than the warning jab of Shego's voice in his head: _Hey, this is a whole new gig for you - whole new people - whole new chance to make a first impression. How about we start by NOT making ourselves sick this time?_

Well, she doesn't need to be so snippy about it.

Drakken begins a slow, carefree walk toward the refreshment table, as if he doesn't care at all whether the chocolate fondue can taste as luscious as it looks, as if there is not the slightest possibility that he might fall in and guzzle it down until he bursts. "Boy, we're sure stocked with some good food tonight," he says offhandedly. (Such a strange expression. It sounds as though it should mean that you're covering your mouth and the words bounce off your hands on their way out.)

"We don't let our agents go hungry at parties," Dr. Director says, her mouth set with pretend sternness. "We've got hors d'oeuvres -"

Those little devils that are surprisingly tasty to eat in spite of being so tricky to spell.

" - chips, salsa, trail mix, veggies with dip, fruit cocktail, three kinds of pie."

Drakken's superior brainpower goes right to work, ranking each edible display on the table in terms of desirability and then quickly narrowing it down to his top five courses, plus an extra for dessert. It comes more easily than he expected, and it is all right, everything is okay, and his heart is slowing down to as leisurely a rate as it ever enjoys.

"And of course," Dr. Director continues, "we have 7-Up, Sprite, limeade, lemonade, wine. . ."

 **WINE.**

He hears the word at the same moment he sees the refraction of light across the glasses, and all his neural pathways lead to the same memory.

Drakken slides to a halt, friction grinding under his heels. The happy-go-luckiness and carefreeity disappear. One glance at those ominous funnel-shaped glasses, and he is dunked deeply into hazy memories of laughter - theirs mocking; his oblivious - and dysfunctional limbs and a swerving path before him.

It spells doom. Or at least abject humiliation.

"Dr. Director?" Drakken squeaks. The five syllables stick together, clammy. Drakken's vacantly aware that his petals have sprouted, fanning across his face as though to erect a barrier between himself and the bottles that sit on the table, taunting him with their juicy red contents. Any minute, they are going to challenge him to a rematch - and Dr. Drakken never could refuse a challenge - and then they will steal his dignity, his second chance at a first impression.

And it will be worse, so much worse, than the incident with the funnel cakes.

Dr. Director looks at him, seeing, Drakken knows, not the mussed-haired scientist who knocked over a ring stand his first day on the job, but the man who chose not to usurp the world he had just saved. "Yes, Dr. Drakken?" she says.

Even the prisms dancing on the surface of the wineglasses don't delay Drakken's response. It is fascinating stuff, and yet with this Very Important Question deviling him, even Drakken can barely notice.

"So say I have this. . . friend," Drakken begins, "who once drank some wine at a convention for supervil - for his old job. . . only nobody bothered to tell him it was wine, and he assumed it was fruit punch, and he drank an awful lot of it, and he might possibly have gotten sloppy drunk and thrown up and in general made an idiot of himself." His volume has risen; Drakken swallows, the muscles in his throat smarting as though they've been exposed to open air. "How. . . how would you suggest he approach this? I mean, so I can go tell him!"

Dr. Director's smooth forehead puckers, one tiny pucker, and she levels an all-seeing gaze on him. Despite the fact that she's only got one eye - well, Drakken _presumes_ she's only got one eye - it's entirely possible that the other is still there, just blind or lazy or even so weird-looking that she wants to cover it up -

Anyway, despite. . . whatever. . . she notices more than most people would with three or four good eyes. Not that he's ever been able to conduct an experiment of that nature.

Not too many specimens - err, people - walking around with extra eyes.

"Well, I would tell your friend that he's certainly not required to drink wine or anything else he's not comfortable with." Dr. Director seems to sculpt every word before releasing it, innocent of irony. "If he chooses to decline, I can assure you he won't be the only one."

"Oh." His cheeks go pink. What was he expecting, really, for them to spray him with a hose full of the stuff? It's an inanimate object made from the juice of grapes. It can't attack him out of nowhere.

Not really.

"Now, we do always drink a toast," Dr. Director says.

Drakken's first, rather silly, instinct is to ask why she's bringing browned bread into this (and his second to try repeating "bringing brown bread" and see how long it takes to become gibberish). His genius reasoning, however, doesn't leave him floundering for long, and he says, "Toast?" His heart pounds a panic off his eardrums, beats-per-minute ricocheting off his stirrup - which is actually a really tiny bone in your ear, in this case, rather than an accessory for a horse.

The thought must subconsciously assign Drakken's hands to protect his belt, because they have a snapping-turtle-grip on it now. Funny - and not funny ha-ha - how he associates horses with the loss of his dignity, too.

"To Global Justice's success in the coming year," Dr. Director says. "It's traditionally done with wine, but if your friend wants to have sparkling grape juice or 7-Up in his glass, no one's going to object."

"Not even Will Du?" Drakken doesn't _mean_ to say that - it simply drops out like a dog's lolling tongue.

Another chucklette. "Actually, Agent Du is a sparkling grape juice man himself. At least for another year."

It takes a moment for Drakken to understand, but when he does, he breaks into a grin that he can feel lifting even the petals around his neck.

"At any rate, we monitor alcohol consumption very closely at our get-togethers." Dr. Director pulls her crisp arms behind her back where they meet with wrists crossed. "We _certainly_ can't afford to have intoxicated agents should an emergency arise."

The logic of that is cold water splashed across Drakken's temporary stupor. He nods, several dozen times, and then slumps in relief against the nearest article of furniture, which happens to be a polished table dusted with fake snowflakes. His gloves come away glitter-sprinkled.

 _So there'd be someone to stop me before I got - what's what word again? Plasty? Tipsered?_

"I'mmmmm. . . mmmmy friend's not an alcoholic or anything," Drakken decides to clarify. "He's just. . . tentative. Wants to know if he can drink just a little wine - for toasting purposes."

"That's entirely his call," Dr. Director says. She closes her good eyelid at a jaunty slant and leaves it closed for a good fifteen seconds, evidence it was meant as a wink and not a blink - sometimes it is hard to tell the difference with her patched-up eye. "It doesn't have to be an all-or-nothing proposal, you know."

 _I know. But it's a lot easier to calculate probability when it is._

(Drakken has enough sense not to say this.)

Instead, he says, "So. . . nothing to worry about?"

"Your friend is in very good hands, Dr. Drakken." Drakken hears affection dancing in Dr. Director's voice, affection and _not_ (thank goodness) amusement. She once again gives him the look that transforms convicts into valued employees before reclaiming her place at the head of the room, bookended by two bulgy-armed guards.

As the tension ebbs from him, Drakken realizes, strangely, that he hasn't felt that itch in months - the incessant, unreachable one that used to flash somewhere in his chest like some GPS arrow telling you that you're on the wrong road, in the wrong place. It shall not be missed.

Maybe now it has nothing more to say to him.

Drakken spots his buddies from Lab 591 across the room, having a breezy chat, their hands parked in the pockets of their lab coats, thumbs spilling over the seams in casual fashion. He strides toward them with as much confidence as he can find - which is not much when your pulse is going quickly enough to be mistaken for that of a nervous rodent.

Images from decades of villain conventions scroll through Drakken's mind like an awful PowerPoint presentation: The rest of the villains connecting in a perfect, geometrically unbreakable circle. Shego taking off to hang out with someone she actually _wanted_ to associate with instead of the one she was just bound to by contract. Himself becoming an irritable wreck, aging as the presentation went on, back getting creakier, spirit more desperate, until he took drastic action and nearly -

His approach slows to a near-crawl. In this moment, he is four years old and inviting them to check out his pillow fort.

But then Professor Ricardo looks up and when his eyes catch on Drakken's, they don't dash away immediately. They hold Drakken's for a good fifteen more pulse-thumps, and then Ricardo raises his arm and waves Drakken over to him. Drakken's awareness narrows to nothing more than his own footsteps, carrying him toward smiling mouths, mouths set in nodding heads, attached to bodies absent of threats.

It will be a historical moment in his autobiography, should Drakken ever get around to writing it.

"Good to see you, Dr. Drakken," Dr. Tarrow says. She parks her elbow against one wall - _lazily_ is the adverb Drakken would use, except he knows this woman and there is nothing lazy about her. "Lab 592 here was just telling us about their latest project."

"Which is?" Drakken says, feeling his ponytail leap off his shoulder blades as he turns to - not the lab next door itself but the good folk that frequent it. It's beyond Drakken how they can lounge against the walls like that, especially when discussing the experimental, mind-boggling and potent in its use for good.

"Resilience gloves," says a man, a resident of Lab 592 whom Drakken has run into in the hall a few times. "You know how on his last couple of raids, Gemini was shooting those little finger missiles?"

Everyone nods, Drakken included. He hasn't ever witnessed one of Gemini's raids on Global Justice, but he's had the (dubious) pleasure of meeting the man at several of the aforementioned villain conventions. Everyone thought he was _all_ that with his mechanical hand, and Drakken wondered if they would pay that type of attention to _him_ if _he_ got himself one of those - until it occurred to him that would mean sacrificing one of the hands he was born with, and then the thought doubled up and retched in his mind.

"These gloves aren't just going to be impenetrable," the same man says.

Drakken realizes he's been fixing a vacant stare at one of the decorative end tables, draped crisply in vermillion and topped with more of those charming pine-cones. He busies himself blinking the man's intellectual smile atop a fibrous brown goatee back into focus as the guy continues, "They should catch anything Gemini shoots at them and send it right on back to him. Poof - he becomes his own worst enemy. Kim Possible's little computer kid suggested it to us; thought it was the one salvageable thing from her battlesuit."

One mention of the little tech-tyke, and Drakken's mind comes alive with several different emotional specimens he can't think how to tag, the old ones seeming a mutated subset of the new. It's _battlesuit_ , though, that quakes his entire frame. Kim Possible has brought it out against him only twice, but those were the two worst good days of his life, and that's a life that's had more than its fair share of such days.

A vine flexes itself deep inside Drakken. (He hates calling his flowers "it," but since - he looked this up - they are both boys and girls at the same time, other pronouns simply aren't applicable.) It reminds him that it will fight for him at his command, that he is not defenseless any longer, that he and Kim Possible have come to a clumsy, newborn truce.

Drakken's laugh comes out harsher than he expected. "Won't that just drive Professor Dementor insane?" he says. "First Kim Possible - now all of Global Justice will have the battlesuit's hand technology before he does!"

Adding "It serves him right" would be childish, and so Drakken does not, except in the privacy of his mind.

Professor Ricardo, thankfully, changes the subject. "Dr. Drakken has made remarkable progress on the reconstruction of the Immobilizer 2000," he tells Goatee.

Blotches break out on Drakken's face, the happy sort of blotches that don't burn so much as tingle. "Well, I don't know how much credit I should accept for that," he says, "considering I was the one who smashed it in the first place." It is a strange new thing, this responsibility - like a neck brace that will put him through any form of discomfort to prevent fracture.

Ricardo dismisses that with a hand. "Oh, don't start in on that," he says. "Any good scientist would have done what you did. Better to have a machine out of commission than in the hands of someone like Dementor."

"Th - thank you," Drakken stammers. He wonders if compliments will ever stop setting his world atilt.

Oh, how he hopes not.

"How are repairs coming along, anyway?" Goatee says.

"We've finished rebuilding the entirety of the framework," Drakken reports. "Now there's only the circuitry left to do, and I get a little bored doing that. A little - _circuit-bored_?"

The laughter is as authentic as the woodsy smell of the pine-cones.

All right - he's mastered Round One. Now to move on to a harder level.

"Actually," Drakken says, dropping to a gravelly whisper, "I greatly enjoy circuits. They just also scare me. It's such a delicate process, and I love the concentration it requires, because it's about the only time I can actually focus - but there are so many opportunities for failure."

On a page, the word _sympathy_ would convulse into _sypmahty_ or something, and yet Drakken has no trouble reading it in every pair of eyes looking back at him.

"And if I fail - _ooohh_ , it'll be a doozy," Drakken concludes. Goose bumps march up his arms.

"You wouldn't be the first one to blow up a lab," another scientist from Lab 592 says. He points a sly grin at Goatee, who lightly shoves him backward with one opened palm.

"So, are you doing anything special for the holidays, Drakken?" asks Professor Ricardo, who Drakken notices is now holding a wineglass of his own. The liquid inside doesn't look as blood-red as it does in Drakken's faulty memory, and Ricardo's steady grasp on the stem muffles the alarm in Drakken's gut.

Drakken is overtaken by a warm glow, like a sun-patch nourishing his vines. " _Every_ thing done for the holidays is special!" he says. "I'll be hanging up my stocking, of course, and then there's the Christmas Eve service at church, not to mention all the baking and wrapping - ooh, and the Annual White Elephant Gift Exchange with the henchmen . . . well, former henchmen, but I'm sure they'll still participate - "

The excitement is too much. Drakken feels it pop somewhere inside him.

No, wait - those are his flower petals, sprouting from his neck in an explosion of yellow to fan outward, as if they want to be included in the good tidings.

There is a chorus of laughter, which Drakken permits because it isn't the kind meant to bite into your flesh. Embarrassing and unpredictable as his plant powers can be, he can't bring himself to resent them. Not when they were the catalyst for the best bad day of his life.

A while later, the group as a whole migrates to the refreshment table, where Drakken takes sensible samples of brownies and dips a few grapes-on-toothpicks into the fondue fountain. The dunking motion of his arms, the gourmet trail of chocolate drizzling down from the emergent strawberries, and the appreciation that Global Justice has provided quality toothpicks that don't break when dunked or, worse still, splinter between his lips - all of it leaves Drakken somewhat giddy.

So much so, in fact, that when the discussion turns to everyone's favorite holiday traditions, Drakken wastes no time thinking before he blurts the words, " _The Six Tasks of Snowman Hank_!"

There is a moment of confusion, a type of exposure that causes Drakken to double-check that his clothes are still on.

And then a girl from Lab 593 - who must be fresh out of training, because she can't be a day older than Shego - bursts out, "Oh, yeah! I remember that from when I was a little kid!" She pulls her pen from its perch over her ear and clicks it smartly three times, even though there's nothing around to write upon. "Would you say that its recent removal from circulation is an indicator of our culture's growing cynicism?"

She speaks the language of science so beautifully that it momentarily disables Drakken's own speech capacity. But it is a question he's been anxious to answer since his North Pole Christmas.

"Definitely, and it's quite a shame, too!" he says. "I mean, what's wrong with a little over-idealism at Christmas? Snowman Hank always said bad guys can turn good, and here I am!"

It's the most stimulating conversation he's ever had with someone of her generation.

Not long after - okay, so the clock says it's been two hours and eight minutes, but Drakken knows for a fact that the space/time continuum functions differently when one is enjoying oneself - Dr. Director steps to the front of the room and tuxedoed waiters spread out in groups of two, one with glasses and the other with the bottles themselves. It's this second waiter who refills Ricardo's glass, gives one to Tarrow, and raises an eyebrow at Drakken when Tuxedo One sticks a wineglass in his hands.

Drakken squeezes the glass until it screaks in protest, frees one hand to hold his thumb and index finger close together. "Just - just a smidgen," he says, even though that's not a legitimate scientific measurement.

Tuxedo Two, however, seems to understand, and he pours a thin liquid layer into the very bottom of Drakken's glass. Drakken stares down at it, mildly surprised at the lack of ominous swirling fluid and yet knowing he shouldn't be. It's fermented grape juice, not _cyanide_ , not death-in-a-bottle.

"A toast!" Dr. Director declares.

The glasses raise. Drakken lifts his, one centimeter at a time, and wills his hands not to shake, not to slosh wine all over the place, glad he opted for just a smidgen, _whatever_ it is. The last thing he would need is to accidentally soak a whole glass-full into his mouth.

"To a bright year ahead!" Dr. Director says. It's likely the same generic phrase she says every year, and yet it hasn't gone stale, doesn't hint that it ever will. "May we continue to help bring peace and justice to the world!"

"Amen!" Drakken adds. His voice is the only one, but he doesn't bother blotching. It's big enough that it doesn't sound alone in this compact room, and it vibrates the few drops of wine in his glass.

 _What is the probability of a man's intoxication should he choose to consume this?_

He shapes it for a moment, one beautiful precise number balancing atop a second, daunting one. As glasses descend to lips, Dr. Director rivets her singular eye to Drakken. She could secure Global Justice with that gaze alone.

Drakken sets his chin, the one he knows kicks out like the heel of a boot, inhales, exhales, raises his glass, and drains it in one sip.

The wine doesn't needle his mouth the way he remembers. There's just a slight sizzle, a brief snap, and then it's gone, down his esophagus and disappearing as he considers Dr. Director's words.

Bright. Such a common, simple word, yet the implications of it are many and mighty. Sunshine breaking naturally, not pried apart by barred shadows. The twinkle of Christmas lights, red and green and gold and purple, those spun around doorways or the ones woven among the blue painted circles above Drakken's own garage. And, someday, a spring where pollen count can do no harm to the man who's part plant.

His future _is_ a bright one, dazzling enough to cause retina damage if not viewed through a pair of eclipse goggles. For the first time in decades, his prospects don't need polishing to achieve that goal.

He's always been optimistic, tried to be anyway, but now - now there's evidence to back him up.

Drakken sets his glass down and touches his temples - no signs of dizziness. He taps his middle to find it in a good mood, and his vision doesn't blur until he squints his eyelashes together.

 _I'm alive!_

 _And I still prefer cocoa moo._

Drakken snaps a salute at the Tuxedos before returning his empty wineglass to Tuxedo One's tray. "Cheers!" he says, and he skips away to catch up with his friends.

 **~To further elaborate on Drakken envying Gemini's finger-missiles, I imagine he broke into a rant for all to hear about how someday HE'D have a mechanical hand and then HE would be the center of the attention and blah-blah. Shego held her hands out over his arms, turned on her plasma, and said, "All right, Dr. D, which hand?" At which point it dawned on him and he freaked out and Shego laughed for about an hour. XD~**


	34. TLC

**~All right, I'm back! I know I have been super-absentminded lately and forgetting to reply to reviews. . . _your feedback still means the world to me._ I'm going to try to some catching-up over the weekend and hopefully it'll stick. Thanks for being so patient, everybody. :)**

 **Here is some angst and some fluff for you.~**

He's cold.

It's spring and it's warm, but he's cold.

Dr. Drakken folds the deep-navy flannel blanket, the one leftover from the night of his disastrous cupcake overdose, around his body like a caterpillar's cocoon so that only his chin pokes out. Its usual pugnacious slant is missing in action, and Drakken can almost feel it sagging to meet his collarbone. His toes shiver inside his socks.

"Please, Shego? Can't you stay one more night?" Drakken asks. His tongue is mushy, his innards sore; he does not bother to shape the words into something less scandalous. Shego knows what he means.

Despite everything that has been displaced in this world, Shego looks exactly the same: eyes studying him from tight slits, matchless mane of hair bristling with sass. She's still ghostly pale, only why does everyone say that as if it makes you look weak and wimpy? Ghosts are terrifying.

Would be if they were real.

And how Drakken wishes he could still be certain that they aren't.

"Yeah, no," Shego says, very impolitely and rather confusingly to boot. Her words come at him so fast, it's as if they're traveling through glass rather than air. "Some of us actually like to _sleep_ at night, so I'm gonna clock out and go home."

 _Would it kill her to be concerned?_

Maybe it would. Perhaps she is somehow allergic to her own kindness, and can only mete out tiny doses at a time before her lungs close up. That would explain so much, actually -

A hypothesis grinds to work in Drakken's brain and then devolves into three or four separate strands that flee like sprightly teen foes he could never hope to catch. When did mere _thinking_ get so difficult?

Shego hoists a mirror-printed shoulder bag onto the appropriate body part and sashays away. "Please," Drakken begs one last time - whines, even, in spite of the scolding from every villainous cell in his body.

He might as well have saved his dignity for all the good it does him. Without a backward glance, Shego exits the living room's hatch-door and clicks the lock shut behind her with the finality of a big, black **THE END**.

Drakken feels as though he's gone through seven different atmospheres, and eight is the most a human body can endure without exploding. He curls fiercely over himself and puts a hand to his chest; it has now been thirty-six hours since it last rumbled with his famed nefarious chuckle.

Thirty-six hours since he awakened from a sleep he didn't recall falling into and found himself bobbing at the surface of a March-chilled ocean, the sky death-red. Clouds like scabs. Saltwater flooding his nostrils, and it was a thousand times more painful than freshwater. Coughing and gagging up more water, also salty, as he stared into Kim Possible's worry-softened face for a miniscule moment before her eyes scorned him again. Yet her arm, so much stronger than it looked, didn't move, kept right on bracing him.

The last thing Drakken remembered, he was in a submarine at the bottom of the ocean - well, not the _very_ bottom, but close enough - with a bright, sunny Wednesday shining above. Now the sun had shifted, started to set, so he'd lost at least six hours.

Who could blame a mad scientist for hoping that he'd conquered the world, and that the event had been so dramatic his brain had suppressed it rather allow it to overwhelm him with joy?

When Shego whizzed the hovercraft by and plucked him from the water, Drakken turned and struggled to stand up. His quads atrophied under him, and he wound up on one knee, his arms around Shego's waist. Rivers of water soaked the richly-embellished purple shirt that flowed down over the knees over the dark pants that had something of the seventeenth century about them, and the cold made a straight shot for Drakken's bones.

Those weren't the clothes he'd been wearing when his memories stopped.

Actually, he'd never seen them before in his life, and he'd remember beauties like those.

Drakken consulted the (thankfully waterproof) watch on his bony wrist. It was late in the day, just as he'd thought, but it was. . . Thursday.

He hadn't lost six hours. He'd lost more than twenty-four.

He asked no questions the rest of the way home.

The lair's sinister atmosphere didn't yield its usual hominess at the return of its master. In fact, the shark tanks and spike pits and shadows of structures put up solely for the scare factor scraped at him, as though they had been overtaken by someone else. As his teeth chattered, Drakken cursed the villainously-low temperature he'd set the thermostat to.

What was intended to be a quick peek in the bathroom mirror turned into a long, shell-shocked stare. The buccaneer-style clothes - which Drakken would have personally expected he'd look rather dashing in - slumped from him as if they were still on hangers, the tasseled sleeves swaying in the space his arms would have been able to fill before prison. His own face aspired to Shego's levels of paleness, mouth twisted off to the side so that he resembled that screaming figure in that famous creepy painting.

That was when Drakken noticed the earring in his right ear. How he missed it until then, he had no clue - the thing was as long vertically as his ear was horizontally, and looped in the majestic way calligraphers wrote the letter _O_. And it wasn't clamped on.

It stabbed straight through.

Drakken was sure he felt a woodpecker tapping at each temple. He'd never pierced his ears.

With shaking hands, Drakken yanked the needle from its little gold clasp and dropped them both to the sink before meeting his bloodshot gaze in the mirror again. He scooched in closer and examined his earlobe in its entirety three or four times, each time coming to the same conclusion:

There was no hole. Not even a small one. His ear was as smooth as talcum powder.

Drakken had to seize the counter with his pinkie fingers to keep from toppling headfirst into the sink. _I' m missing something, I'm missing something, I have to be missing something_ , because there is no explanation for this.

No _natural_ explanation.

Drakken backed away from the sink, away from the hateful little piece of beautiful jewelry. He doesn't misbelieve or unbelieve - or whatever the stupid word is - in the supernatural, not exactly, but that has to do with what happens _after_ you die. When a person was still in _this_ world, they shouldn't run into anything that can't be pared down to a collection of quarks.

The silence in the room was ear-piercing.

 _Ooohh - bad choice of words._

His lab coat forgave his abandonment and welcomed him back, circling as snugly as it could around the frame that felt frailer than at his last mental checkpoint. Yet even it couldn't warm him.

The events not spoken shiver inside him. They remain unexplained, and he hopes to leave them that way forever.

Drakken knows only two things for sure: (1) he could have been dead - no, _would_ have been dead, no question about it - if not for (2) Kim Possible had saved his life.

Even now, the thought nearly splits Drakken's nerves at the seams. He's alive, if not well, and who does he owe it to? Kim Possible, the girl who's been a bone in his throat from the minute they crossed paths!

It isn't the first time she's done it, of course, not with his propensity for getting himself into, errr, less-than-ideal situations. It _is_ the first time he's felt indebted to her.

And what the heck is that about? Why the hesitant squeeze between his shoulder blades when he thinks of repaying her with an untimely demise? When did he become - well, what happens when a person stops being ruthless? Do they start developing _ruths_ , and what are those besides a rather pretty girl's name?

It's almost sickening.

As if on cue, Drakken's stomach gurgles, and not for the dinner he's been denying it. This is a loud, harsh, angry demand that doesn't even know what it wants, except that it's certainly nothing Drakken can provide. A close relative to nausea grips his head and won't let go, and all of his senses sour, right down to the touchpads on his fingertips.

To remain still a moment longer would be to let it infect the rest of him.

Drakken untangles himself from the suddenly-stifling blanket and dashes back to the bathroom, slamming on the proverbial brakes when he passes the medicine cabinet. He paws, quivering, through boxes of Band-Aids and tubes of antibiotic ointment until the bright pink of a Pepto-Bismol bottle flashes into view, the light at the end of the tunnel.

But it feels awfully weightless in his grasp. Drakken gives the bottle a shake and moans when he hears the rattle of the cap and nothing else. "NNGGH BLAAH!" he cries. "What kind of _idiot_ puts an empty Pepto-Bismol bottle back in the cabinet?"

 _The kind who's too wrapped up in conquering the world to notice he's used the last drop, that's who._

"That was a rhetorical question!" Drakken barks at nobody and heaves the pink bottle at the wall. It strikes with a noise like thunder and then collapses to the floor, expended and useless.

Ah, blast it all. His mother's medicines work better anyway.

The fatigue he hasn't been able to shake for the past thirty-six hours bombards Drakken again. He's used to running on two or three hours of sleep a night, charged by his own determination, but now. . . now everything aches and his eyelids droop and he slides down the wall and permits them to close.

This is a mistake. Without reality to block it out, his world consists of water pressure and spiraling clouds, with only the presence of a bratty teen nemesis to save him from an unidentified _something_ that's fully prepared to swallow him whole. There's an image stamped across his memory - he thinks it might be a pirate, but it's difficult to tell considering it fades like the gray dots in that one optical illusion when you look at it straight-on.

Drakken gasps and jolts his eyes back open. The bathroom tiles waver in a soundless lecture of how long it's been since he's taken out his contacts. It's one of his least favorite bodily malfunctions, that dry, suctioned pain.

Still, at least it's physically fixable, unlike the untouchable rash inside his chest. He's had this big long crack down his heart for as long as he can remember. But now there are thousands of tiny fissures radiating out from it, making it difficult to even close his eyes.

And impossible to be alone.

Drakken pries himself off the floor. Fine, then. He's too cold and too tired to deny that he needs someone.

He needs the one person he shouldn't need anymore.

Creaky legs sizzle back to life (an acidic feeling that puts a rotten taste in his gullet) as Drakken lurches back down the hall and into his office. His hands skid up and down his sleeves, over and over, faster than the second hand on his watch - he knows; he's timing it. Inside himself, Drakken is sure he's reached absolute zero, a condition mainstream scientists haven't yet been able to recreate.

It is a testament to his genius, Drakken thinks, and it fails to quicken his blood or warm him in any way. He must be sick then, must be _very_ sick, sick with whatever is turning the spiny almost-curls of his ponytail to icicles.

That makes what he is about to do a little more excusable.

Drakken picks up the phone from its caddy on his office desk and taps out a pattern on the square white keys that are like miniatures of his teeth. It doesn't spring as easily to mind as the safety code to his security system, and that shivers in some hollow place inside him he can't locate. The phone gives a few operatic _brrring_ s, and then there is a _click_ as someone picks up, and then that someone's even breathing.

"Mama?" Drakken blurts. It disgraces the villain community to even say the word, he knows, but fear has made him shameless.

" _Drew_ bie!" That voice - that voice like hydroplaning tires - is the single loveliest sound in the world. Normally he doesn't enjoy his mother's company, how it requires him to practically clamp his tongue in a vise to not reveal his secrets.

But she might be the only one left that he can trust.

"How _are_ you, dearheart?" Mother asks.

Drakken hesitates. He can't answer because he's missing pieces of the truth, and it would surely ruin her even if he did manage to pin it down.

"Who, me? Oh, I'm just _great_ , Mother!" Drakken's voice cracks as though he has been timewarped back three decades.

"So. . . nothing's wrong?" Mother's words are seasoned with doubt, a sound Drakken has never put there before.

He _is_ slipping. Mother used to swallow even his most pathetic lies.

Drakken immediately recites the periodic table to himself, from hydrogen to ununbium. Separates the metals from the nonmetals, the synthetic from the organic. Notices the icy color of his knuckles, unhealthy even for a blue man.

"Drewbie?" Mother repeats his baby name. There's no rash of embarrassment. She is warmth, and Drakken inches toward her, eager for the thaw.

"All right. The truth is. . . the truth is, Mother, something _is_ wrong. I don't know what's happened exactly, but _something_ has, and it's given me the willies. And I don't want to be alone. So do you think. . . just for the night, I mean. . ." Drakken swallows hard, one foot beating the floor in no particular rhythm, defying his feeble commands to stay still. "Could I come home?"

He holds his breath, like a child waiting to be summoned to the principal's office, unsure if mercy will be shown to him, objectively aware that it shouldn't be.

But obviously. This is his _mother_. Even before she speaks a word, Drakken can almost sense her forgiveness flowing over the phone lines.

"Ohhhhh, of course you can!" Mother speaks with a thickness that melts Drakken's frozen grip on the phone. "You know you're welcome any time, sweetums. It's your home, too."

Drakken flops heavily into his office chair, firm against the brittle body that surprises him, and crosses his legs so that the wriggling foot only thumps against the air. Perhaps the red he sees when he closes his eyes is the massive psychological debt he's wracking up with everyone.

"Thank you, Mother," he says. "I'll - I'll be over soon."

"Bring some jammies and your toothbrush. I'll have dinner ready. And don't forget to pack a change of underwear!" Mother says, loudly enough to suggest a lack of faith in their trans-Pacific connection.

Drakken's ears are too cold to burn.

He bids her goodbye and digs an "I love you" out of storage, blows the dust off it.

She says, "I love you too." It might be the first thing he's ever launched that ended up exactly where it was meant to go.

Drakken hangs up first so he won't be confronted with the dial tone, its lonesome song almost as grating as a perky teenaged shout of, "You are SO not, Drakken!" Spine against the wall, he rides it to the floor again and skips a hand across his face, wincing. His very hair follicles are tender to the touch, as if they were subjected to vigorous exercise during his lost day. A ridiculous thought, perhaps, considering they can barely eke out a whisker to save their lives. . .

Fatigue drapes Drakken like the curtain the Evil Eye Trio spread across him before they cropped his hair. He fought that yet couldn't win, and he knows he won't be able to win against this, either. Not without someone else in his corner.

Yes, Shego would call it lame, and he's well aware she would be right, and no, there's nothing he can really do about it. The lair is, after all, empty of even a foolish, incompetent, caring henchman. They have been left behind maybe, last seen in the submarine Drakken is starting to believe he might have just imagined to begin with.

And the sun has already gone down. It's a ghostly night, all silver and shadow, and in the shivering, inexplicable part of himself, Drakken knows he's had more than enough of ghosts.

For now, the fear is so strong it extinguishes the humiliation of being a grown man, cared for by little old ladies and girls barely old enough to be out of college. He is a wounded beast - maybe a caribou - stumbling blindly through what's left.

Drakken attempts to persuade himself that he is, in fact, a lion, mightiest predator of the savanna. But even lions can be hurt. He's seen some reduced to tranquilized, mewling balls on the Discovery Channel, and he's felt for them.

 _I'm just a master manipulator, remember?_ _My vulnerability has been carefully calculated to generate sympathy in these unsuspecting citizens!_

The thought should fill him with pride. Instead, Drakken watches what's left of his ego dissipate into microscopic particles, as though hit with a _successful_ Shrink Ray.

Without it, he is little more than a bony, declawed kitten with a mean streak. Drakken hugs his knees, lost in yards of blue fabric that used to fit, up to his chest, squirming under the freezer burn that seems to gnaw on his skin. His heart, the one thing every villain desperately needs to ice over, is the one thing that refuses to numb. It seems to bruise anew with each beat.

There's a frog, he remembers abruptly, that lives as far north as the Arctic tundra. In the wintertime, its body shuts down and everything except its heart freezes over, leaving it unharmed when spring blooms again. It reawakens and hops along on its froggy way as if nothing ever happened.

Because if your heart freezes over - you're dead.

At least it stops hurting, though Drakken wouldn't say it's worth everything else also ending. Back in prison - that was one thing. But now, now that he's out and the world is still here, ripe for conquering, all he can think is that he's meant to keep on living. Especially after today's near-death experience.

If Kim Possible, who has more grounds than anyone to wish him dead, wouldn't leave him to his fate - well, it's never worked before to question her judgment.

* * *

On the hovercraft flight over there, Drakken tries to concentrate on. . . well, on the hovercraft flight over there.

It isn't technically a _flight_ in the aeronautics sense, not a bird's flight where the lift runs perpendicular to their natural wings, not what planes mimic with their metal ones. The hovercraft can only defy gravity a few miles above ground and scoot around at a respectable pace even without the wind pushing it along.

 _And that's_ not _me cutting corners because I'm not smart enough to invent the real deal! That's me being smart and. . . economical!_

Still, Drakken is sure that no plane has ever experienced the swing that churns inside him now, as though his horizontal and vertical forces want to travel in two fundamentally different directions: the vertical to seek sanctuary in his mother's home, the horizontal to hole up in his lab and not emerge until he has stumbled upon the key to global conquest.

And there's a problem he's never had before - the thought of returning to his lair, his wonderful lair, is like an IV drip of ice. There's no formula to get rid of the un-and-hopefully-never-to-be-explained. He will contend with solitude. Not the kind conductive to evil plotting. The kind that distributes your heartbeat through your whole body so that it seems to crouch just beneath your skin. Just like it did when Shego disappeared for a week.

At least then he had a particularly insolent pickle jar to occupy him.

Drakken strangles the steering gear, which is juddering violently in his grasp, even as his mother's house comes into view, tall and muddy and scrawny compared to the blocky, beige houses a few streets over. Right now, in one of said houses, Kim Possible is preparing to do her homework, or settling down to dinner, or suiting up to go fight some supervillain who _isn't_ in the throes of a mental drought.

Even the thought of her proximity can't cramp Drakken's insides any further.

The hovercraft is almost too narrow for the driveway he parks it on, filling his mouth with a spinachy flavor and blazing motive across every cell, nourishment for the horizontal force. But Drakken swings himself out, clicks the force field into place around the hovercraft, and follows the vertical up the driveway onto the porch that sags between two ratty posts as though that blasted Mr. Sit-Down has used it for a bench.

Come to think of it, maybe he also sat on Drakken during his blackout. It would explain his deflation.

Drakken sniffs and gives the front porch another clinical scan. She has her spring decorations up - the leaves-and-grass clingy-thingies stuck to the storm door, the ceramic chicks sitting just inside, the plastic two-foot-high Easter bunny perched in an outside corner. Man, that thing gave him the creeps when he was a tyke.

And everything clinical in him begins to fail.

That bunny is the least of his worries now. (This is an expression. The _actual_ least of his worries would probably be that a vending machine would fall from the sky and crush him - because when has that ever happened, really?)

Drakken pokes the doorbell. Its chime is inseparable from Mother's squeal inside. He straightens out his lab coat's lapels and rearranges his facial expression.

When the door opens, something floral slides up on Drakken's nostrils - something silky, if scents can be silky. The atmosphere pinpoints to just that scent and Mother's smile, straining the corners of the tiny-bow lips Drakken didn't inherit.

At long last, someone is happy to see him.

"Hello, Mother." The words were typed neatly in Drakken's head, the essence of composure, but as soon as he says them they drift into his sloppy cursive scrawl, letters bending backward and running together.

Mother's response - "Drewbie!" - is predictable yet not unwelcome. Her arms go around him and squeeze until he feels them meet behind his spinal column.

Drakken isn't planning on hugging her back, but she smells like that cucumber-melon lotion he gave her for Christmas, and the wiriness of her old-lady hair is surprisingly comfy against his cheeks, which feel cold all the way from the inside. That is when his limbs quit on him - don't even give him two weeks' notice, just conk out and strand him in her embrace.

"Drewbie?" Mother repeats. It is softer this time - well, as soft as Mother's voice ever gets - and a cucumber-melon palm goes to his forehead.

"I'm tired," Drakken says truthfully.

"Well, I should say so!" Although he sees only the back of her head, Drakken knows his mother's eyes snap. "You look like death warmed over."

Yes, well, if he were as bloated and pink as a boiled shrimp, Mother would still say he was too thin and pale. That's just how it is.

Still, as Drakken drags himself over the threshold, his feet are strangely heavy. Mother puts an arm around his waist as though she expects him to lean against her, but he doesn't want to assign her his full weight, decreasing though it may be. Together and with very little coordination, the two of them hobble to the couch that Mother bought when he was in eighth grade, the year she got her promotion.

Drakken collapses onto it, turned boneless by relief.

"What would you like for supper?" Mother's question somehow comes from a great distance, as if his ear canals are sealing themselves off, trying to become vacuums.

"I'm not hungry," Drakken mumbles.

Mother's brows touch the cumulonimbus cloud of her hair, which is a feat in and of itself. It is, admittedly, not a sentence she's heard often from him. "You haven't been loading up on sweets again, have you?"

"No, Mother. Not recently," Drakken says - also truthfully; ever since the cupcake incident, his beloved sweets are a nauseating option. This is the most honest conversation he's had with her since he was about seven years old.

Although he could have gone on a sugar binge during the blackout, for all he knows.

Mother scours him with a stare - such a stare! No one would ever guess how gullible she is.

Drakken feels his Adam's apple expand and bob in his throat like a _real_ apple you'd bob for in a tub of water. "As I said, I'm tired," he says. "Can I just rest for a while?"

"Go right ahead," Mother says, blinking. "Why, I never thought I'd see the day when you asked me that! You've always been Little Mr. Busy-Busy-Busy. Even as a baby, you hated to nap - "

She speaks as if he knows nothing about his own infancy, and the hairs on the back of Drakken's neck have already settled for the night. He does likewise, rolling over onto his side on the couch that seems so confining after his own king-sized-and-then-some mattress. Curling around himself to make the uncertainty smaller. Nestling down into the collar that already encapsulates most of his neck.

As weary-pained as they've become, Drakken's eyes are still reluctant to close. In the brief darkness, he's reminded of a nightmarish place where nothing feels real. A land where he's running and running, but his feet never touch the ground.

A land where an entire day and night can go unaccounted for.

Obviously, he didn't take over the world in his off-hours, because the call had gone out for a retreat back to the lair. . . did he come close? Was he overcome by a breathtakingly brilliant purpose for his new doom ray? Did he build it and lay waste to that charming little seaside hamlet? Had he finally impressed his blase sidekick?

Drakken's eyes fly wide open, seeing nothing.

Shego. Did he. . . did he do her harm that day? Had he copped a beserker (as the kids today say - or if they don't, they _should_ ) and wound up hurting her?

Again?

It is this thought, much more than the unknown whereabouts of the yellow rain slicker he loves, that traps Drakken's stomach in Antarctica. The image of a limp Shego, hoisted high in alien arms, molds to his memory, and he can't shake it loose.

 _Why is the only type of evil I'm capable of the one type I despise?_

The room blurs behind a thicket of eyelashes. He was on the submarine and Shego was there. He stepped underneath the suction hose and was buried in sand, he remembers - got some down the back of his boxers, which is a sensation one doesn't soon forget. The henchmen cleaned him off, and then. . . then everything went black.

No, no, before the blackness, there's a quick glimpse of his own face. Smiling. He's. . . happy about something. . . something he found under the sand. . .

 _Wood._

Drakken can't place that detail before his brain lapses into Sleep Mode.

* * *

He awakens to a smell that soothes his nose hairs. Light and mild, just one smell-shade up from no scent at all, and

Drakken sits up, nose twitching before he's even fully re-conscious.

A bowl of chicken noodle soup is being offered to him. Tiny hunks of white meat, broth thick and juicy-looking, noodles that haven't yet gone limp. And carrots. Chopped bits of baby carrots, because someone knows he doesn't like adult carrots in his soup.

The quality of the servitude, the safety wrapped around him - for a gorgeous moment, Drakken is sure he's been coronated in his sleep.

"Eat your soup, Drewbie," a woman says. She gives his stomach a poke that reminds him it's caving in.

Something thunders through Drakken - disappointment _times_ disappointment with guilt as an exponent.

"I hate to wake you up, but darling, you've got to eat something," Mother continues. She pats his hand. Her fingers are short and stubby, like the baby carrots.

His surroundings blink into focus. Mother's got him all set up, a soft wooden TV tray on his left-hand side. It's stocked with Kleenexes, and the very tenderness of the gesture makes Drakken want to start sobbing.

Drakken grabs her baby-carrot fingers between his own and squeezes. Her skin seems to secrete love, though he knows that isn't physically possible, knows it is only the lotion she applies every time she washes her hands. And all he wants is to be a proper benefactor of a son, pay her back for all she's done for him.

Instead, he's an imposition, a middle-aged louse whose maternal-affection card should have expired long ago.

Drakken drops his eyes to their entwined hands and begins to play with her supple veins (can never find his own anymore since they blend right in with his skin). "I'm sorry," he says.

Mother looks as surprised as the steep plunge in Drakken's chest feels. When was the last time _those_ words fell from him? It must have been about the same time his baby teeth did.

She takes advantage of his self-astonishment to swoop down and drive the spoon between his lips. Drakken swallows the odd comfort and prays his stomach won't decide to evict it. He'd hate to repay her kindness by upchucking all over the couch that stands so bravely despite its own sag.

Mother brushes aside a sweat-dampened spine of his hair. "For what?"

 _For what? For everything!_ Each of his foul misdeeds lazes in the air between them - surely she can smell it, too?

Drakken settles for, "Freeloading."

There's a sharp whine from Mother's windpipe, almost a teakettle whistle, nothing else.

"I mean, for still needing you so much," Drakken clarifies. "And I don't mean 'needing' you like 'I'd prefer to have you around.' I need you the way I need - water! Or science! Or basic oxygen!"

He pauses to consider why "world domination" was not the first item on that list. His Mother Filter isn't usually that capable - at least not automatically.

"I - I feel bad that you're obligated to take care of me just because I have fifty percent of your DNA," Drakken says. "I mean, I also share fifty percent of my DNA with a banana, and you don't see me taking in stray bananas - "

His argument is truncated when Mother grabs him and begins to laugh-cry into his hair. "Drew Lipsky," she says, "you know perfectly well that isn't what it's about."

It is not the tone she uses to chide him. This is almost as if she's singing. It wraps around him like a wad of gauze.

 _Does_ he know that? And how does she know he knows that? Next thing he knows she's going to be telling him he's a deeply sensitive person who's turned to science to make sense of his emotions or some malarkey like that.

Drakken glances down at himself, at the knees anxiety has worn down into bony stabs, at the drool just starting to dry on his collar. "I've always needed someone," he gripes. He pictures Shego, Shego who spent over twenty-four hours with him in his unnatural, unknowable state, and shudders.

"Absolutely you have." Mother stirs the fat metallic spoon marked with dings and chips around the soup bowl. "You have always needed someone, and you've never let us."

This _is_ a truth. It is a substance to which addiction is too likely. Cannot be indulged in even small doses.

"I wish you would 'freeload' a little more often, in fact," Mother says. "If you didn't need me anymore, I wouldn't know what to do with myself. You hear me?"

She is sharp and formidable again, her hands buried on her plump little hips, and Drakken finds himself nodding before he's fully comprehended what he's agreeing to. Mother actually sets the soup bowl down and loops a throw around his shoulders as though she knows every crease and cave and peak of them. Drakken assumes it's just another one of her throws - she is as prolific with those things as spiders are with their webs - and then he recognizes the chocolate stain on one carefully knitted corner.

This is the throw she sent with him to college. Objective scientific studies would no doubt deem it the soft, non-scratchy, warmth-holding Worldwide Champion of Blankets.

"Are you okay, Drewbie?" Mother asks.

Gnnngh. Why?

This is one of the few things Drakken _can't_ lie to his mother about. Mother claims reading his face is no more difficult than reading a book. . . and apparently books are easy for most people to read.

"No," Drakken admits. He blinks several times, only to find himself remaining wet-eyed. It's no use. If something doesn't happen quick, he's going to cry, and he might never stop. He's already cried more this year than in the two previous years combined, any crime cred he earned through the Diablo attack long since washed away.

A few years ago, he had the additional perk of always understanding _why_ he was crying: Shego insulted him; Kim Possible foiled him; he slammed a door on his thumb. Now the tears occur inexplicably, cut deeper, and cannot be reasoned away.

And the guilt. Where did _that_ come from? Drakken can remember a day when he felt those little pangs about as often as he scrubbed down the bathroom sink. Cowards that they are, they only materialize too late to actually change anything. Somehow they are substantial enough to press actual density into his belly while remaining invulnerable to the Peter Pufferpuff toys he once hurled their way and then watch clatter emptily to the floor, where Drakken rushed to recover them before they fell into a shark tank and were lost forever.

 _Ten more seconds. Just give me ten more seconds and I can pull myself together. . ._

"What is it, sugar?" Not _Drewbie_ , which he could handle. _Sugar_ is reserved for high fevers and night terrors.

"I know you don't want me to act like a child!" Drakken bursts out. "You pressured me about meeting a girl and settling down and you told me I was too old to be playing with my toy trains! And you were right. It should be time to grow up - and I just don't know how to - how to - "

 _How to talk, for one thing._ Misfired attempts pop from his mouth in a non-pattern even the best statistician couldn't chart.

The light above the stove rattles, the way it always has.

His mother settles into the wide space left by his legs and kneads one foot. At that moment, Drakken longs to be someone else, somebody who her touch won't terrify. Mother deserves to be able to comfort her son, even if her son doesn't deserve to be comforted.

"Only because I was worried about you," Mother says. Her voice is the thickness of the broth, the ragged texture of the chicken chunks. "I'd read somewhere that when adults regress to childish behavior, it's usually because they've been damaged somehow - like by a death in the family, or a really bad injury, or a. . . divorce."

Oh. _Oh._

Drakken rocks himself, throw and all, into the back of the sofa and stays there in a lump. Part of him wants to argue that no, he is not _damaged_ , not like some antique rocking chair at an auction house. Teeth marks on the headrest. Stripped of its varnish. Sold at a discount.

And yet here he is, one wound away from unfixable.

"This is completely different," Mother says, as though she has settled the matter for all time. "Something has broken you inside, and when we break, we all become children. It's not like you're being a baby."

"Really?" Drakken says. A lukewarm wave laps at him, bringing him closer to room temperature if nothing else.

"Not at all, Drewbie." Mother shines like some kind of freshly polished jewel. At least her fingers aren't climbing over his cheeks, searching for something to pinch. Not that he has anything left anymore.

Kim Possible - she came apart once, and it was his doing. Drakken remembers her face, her broken betrayed face as she jolted in Eric's electrified hands. It revealed her for what she was: a teenage girl, flighty and insecure, attempting to play hardball with the world's most notorious supervillains.

For some reason, Drakken's mental lens switches to his most recent view of the girl, her eyes like two beakers of liquid paris green that hardened into powder the instant he began to speak. She is not a pleasant thought, still filling him with resentment and irritation. Yet now he has no wrath, no murderous edge, and he wonders what's to become of him.

Drakken's always been skeptical of out-of-body experiences, and that's not what he's having right now. It's more an out-of- _essence_ suspension, as though he is a bisected worm, abruptly separated from his own other half. The absence she leaves in him is frightful.

 _It'll be different once I see her again. We'll rediscover why we've always loathed one another and - and mend our hero/villain relationship! And things will go back to normal!_

Whatever that is.

Drakken obediently opens his mouth for more soup.

When Mother spoons some in, Drakken glances at her and instantly wishes he hadn't. There are a few tears glistening on the tippy-tops of her beautiful rounded cheekbones.

"Oh, for the love of _Tesla_." The name that he admires so much cracks between Drakken's teeth like a mouthful of Pop Rocks. "Don't _cry_ , Mother. I've already told you _you_ weren't the one who damaged me! You're not the one who abandoned me - or beat me up -"

Now he's said too much, he knows, and Drakken rears back, but it's too late; Mother has already heard. Her baby-carrot fingers turn to claws on the throw's fringe.

"Beat you _up_? Who did _that_?" Mother's eyes narrow, and Drakken sees the lethal side of himself reflected in them. "You're not telling me that your fa -"

Drakken shakes his head until it dizzies. "No, no, no, not him. It was. . . .kids. Other kids. Back when _I_ was a kid. And some of the guys in prison, too." The outline of a near-healed slice ignites on his arm.

"You never told me," Mother says in her take on a whisper. "All those times you came home with bruises - I thought you were just clumsy."

"I am _not_ clumsy," Drakken starts to say, with a finger stabbing the air for emphasis, but he can't untangle his hand from the throw's clutches without a series of frustrated moves that almost snap his wrist in the process.

He waits for Mother's chuckle, a treble-clef version of his, yet it never comes. Instead, she is glowering, her lipstick angry pink against its pale surroundings. She never tans either. . .

"I didn't want you to worry," Drakken says. While the words are meant to be noble, they come out as spindly as deer legs.

Mother's voice is tightly reined in, as though that is the only way she can hold back the hysterical crying he remembers so well. "Drewbie, it was _not_ your job to keep me from worrying."

 _That's good, because I really stunk at it._

Drakken manages to swat the thought away, and it is promptly replaced by the image of Mother swinging her purse left and right at eighth-graders taller than she is. It's strangely as satisfying to picture as the gilded throne he daydreams about. "Telling you would have only made it worse, anyway," he reminds himself out loud.

"How in the _world_ do you figure that?"

"Because they already believed I was a pathetic little mama's boy who couldn't do anything for myself!" Drakken says. "If you came in and fought for me, that only would have proved it!"

The room goes silent. The breaths Drakken take feel unstable, imbalanced, too much nitrogen with too little oxygen.

"Land's sakes," Mother says at last. "That's despicable."

Now Drakken doesn't dare breathe at all. He's always believed that - always _had_ to believe that - but there was still that nagging little censure inside him, the one that sounded like James Possible and his daughter and Professor Dementor and Shego and Jack Hench. Mathematically speaking, with each new person who calls you a failure, the odds of them _all_ being wrong become smaller and smaller.

"Who did this to you?" Mother demands. "I want names!"

"Mother, you can't go chase them down after thirty years -"

"I'm not chasing anybody down." The spoon pries his mouth apart again, and more warm broth defrosts his tongue before Mother sets the bowl back on the TV stand. "I just need to know."

He does not have the ingredients necessary to concoct a lie. "Carl Thompson," Drakken says. It is a privilege to be able to finally say his name with the appropriate curled lip. Nobility has faded to a decimal point inside him, and it's with a sick glee that Drakken watches it go.

"Carl _Thomp_ son?" Mother's elbow startles, knocking the bowl, which clatters from side to side without spilling a drop. It's the exact same sound the trays in the prison cafeteria made whenever someone slammed them to the greasy tabletop and stood up, a reliable precedent to an ambush, and he can't help the flinch in his eyes. "But he always seemed like such a nice kid."

Drakken squints at his mother, her pink hair wobbling in his line of sight like something from Dumbo's drunken hallucination. He would stomp a foot if his legs weren't frostbitten together. "See, this is _another_ reason I never told anyone!" he says. "I knew no one would believe me! I knew - "

"No, no, no, sweetheart." Mother waves her hands widely, as though trying to right the suddenly-spinning room. "I believe you."

Those words are tiny pockets of heat, reverse snow, falling against the block of ice his body has become; _I_ brings feeling back to his cheeks, _believe_ to his feet, _you_ to his chest.

Unfortunately, the itch also comes back to life, worse than on any external point, even the ones that can't be reached by natural means. Worse because it causes him to spurt, " _Why_ do you believe me? I've lied to you about so much - "

Mother gives him one of those tunnel-looks that almost convince him she's wearing X-ray goggles, that she can gauge the state of his soul. "Because that is not who my son is," she says. "My son is a sweet boy with a good heart."

Well, her X-ray goggles need glasses, too. She is wrong, and he is wrong for the tingle that comes over him, the tingle of stepping indoors out of a blizzard and frost-nip melting from your limbs in numb patches. A "sweet boy with a good heart" could not be an evil genius, and no supervillain worth his weight in Brainwashing Shampoo should ever be inspired at being called thus.

Besides, even X-ray goggles would only reveal his intestines and liver and other organs - souls are both theoretical and invisible.

"I just wish there was something I could have done to help," Mother says.

Drakken groans at the quaver he hears. There is only one person in this room who deserves to feel guilt, and it's not her. Nowadays he carries it around constantly and would gladly slough it on anyone else in the world, just _not_ her.

"I don't think there's anything you could have done, Mother," Drakken says. He falls into the coo typically only used to alleviate his own fears - or those of Commodore Puddles. It feels good to be spreading it to another human being, thinning it into something that can actually be swallowed. "Even switching schools wouldn't have done any good, unless you also could have gotten me plastic surgery." He lets out a hard parody of a laugh. "Although I hear plastic surgery's getting cheaper these days. . ."

"Oh, don't get me started on that," Mother says, sounding as if she would like nothing _better_ than to get started on that. "I received a flier in the mail the other day that said a plastic surgeon was setting up office in Upperton, and asked if I had any 'problem areas' I needed work on. Just pay several hundred _thousand_ dollars, and they can snip off your moles, your cellulite, and your wrinkles, then they say they'll sew you right back up, and they say it'll be no worse than a bloody nose."

" _Why_ do they say that?" Drakken says. "Bloody noses are AWFUL!"

That, and cellulite and wrinkles aren't _snipped_ , exactly. Wrinkles are artificially smoothed, whereas cellulite. . . isn't suction involved?

Mother smiles, which is good, because that's what her face was made for, not these scowls that have become a permanent fixture on his. She kisses Drakken on the cheek, right where the follicles still smart, and maybe he could make himself not cringe if not for that. As it is, he retreats against the arm of the sofa and occupies his gaze elsewhere so he can't watch her be disappointed in him.

"Do you need to go back to sleep?" Mother says. She pulls one of his boots off and sets it lovingly on the thin fuzzy carpet.

Half of Drakken's body thinks, _Yick, sleep_. The other half is too busy yawning. He wrinkles his own nose, jammed with crusty gunk he doesn't dare pick out in her presence.

Although, come to think of it, Mother _has_ been a lot less finicky about such things ever since she found out Drakken's status as an international criminal. It's like she thinks he's contracted villainy like a disease, and she's concentrating all her hyper-mother concern on healing him.

If anyone can, it will be her.

Drakken shifts, suddenly uncomfortable in a way he cannot blame on temperature or texture. The comic books he used to read - okay, sometimes still _does_ read - always speak of wayward citizens being "consumed by the darkness," as though they had no choice in the matter.

This, Drakken knows, is patently ridiculous. _He_ was the one who chose to consume the darkness. It looked delicious and quenching as it poured like soda pop, and then you swallowed it and it became tar, oozing and clinging to your every crevice, and it didn't taste good, and it wasn't pretty, but it was at least living kinetic energy. Now its strength, too, has left him, powerless in his own shriveling flesh.

The window over Mother's shoulder reveals nothing out there but more darkness. Inside, the bulbs are burning their little fifty-watt hearts out and, of course, there is Mother herself, who is so relentlessly pure it is a wonder light doesn't pour out of her orifices.

He left light behind a long time ago. It has always been inaccessible to Drakken, one of those buildings where you need a photo ID to enter, or where the sign out front reads "Gone to Lunch" even at five in the evening. Now his mother - and Kim Possible, of all people to care - are offering him handfuls of the light, samples for him to try.

And no lab analysis can show him what will happen if he accepts it.

It is as if something clicks into place within Mother then, like one row of blocks on a Rubik's cube, and she begins to bustle around in her dreaded, wonderful wind-up-toy fashion. "Have you been eating well?" she asks.

Drakken's first, surprised reaction is one of - well, perhaps not true relief, but a watered-down, low-fat replica of it. "Yes," Drakken says. "Just yesterday, I had a banana. And celery." He squints at his mother. "I had peanut butter on it. Is that. . . nutritionally sound?"

"Gracious me, I can't imagine why it _wouldn't_ be!" Mother says. "How about the day before?"

The day before the ocean had him in its jaws and was about to slurp him straight down to the bottom.

Drakken makes his shoulders shrug, even though they are about a whale-weight each. "I don't remember," he says, and there's a note of hysteria in it that he didn't manage to pluck out before it left.

"Have you been _drinking_?" Mother leans into him as though she can sniff out a days-old rum binge on his breath. She probably can.

Drakken jerks away. "Of course not! Mother, you know I don't drink!"

(And why in the _world_ did he think _rum_ instead of beer or whiskey?)

Wrinkles form around Mother's mouth and then are dashed away with the smoothness of her smile. "No, dear, I meant _water_. Are you getting your eight cups a day?"

"Yes." It is the only possible answer to that question, Drakken has found. Whenever he tries to bargain it down to the two or three cups he actually consumes, Mother begins to lecture him about dehydration and asks questions about his bathroom habits, and Drakken would sooner have poison ivy than that conversation.

"Have you been taking your vitamins? Let me see your gums!" Mother pries his lips apart to examine the gumline, the only patch of skin to have been spared the bluing.

It must be satisfactorily rosy - or whatever color it's supposed to be - because she lets go of his lips and permits them to sag in on themselves again. They're dry. Not _dry_ as in Shego's sarcasm. _Dry_ as in you'd think they'd never touched a drop of water in their lives.

"When did you last visit your doctor?" Mother barks.

"Three weeks ago," Drakken says, licking his bottom lip.

"And what did he say?"

"To eat more regular meals," Drakken replies promptly (leaving out the part where he was also advised not to consume a cubic acre of cupcakes in order to get rid of them - he'd much prefer that story not circulate). "Try and gain some weight. Not work so hard. I think it's mostly stress anyway, Mother," he adds.

Drakken waits for a hailstorm of questions - how many hours a day is he working, how strict is his schedule, is he still hunched over a desk all the time, when does he go to bed, how much sleep does he get? They never come.

Mother just sits back on her heels and blinks as if he has zapped her with the stun gun he hasn't invented yet. It occurs to Drakken that the number of times he has admitted stress to her must be smaller than the number of Bengal tigers still left in the wild. Illness is one thing. There's no shame in illness, as long as it was born from contagion or various other environmental factors that are nobody's fault, and she could easily have a hand in repairing him.

Stress, though, would only task her with the knowledge that she can't fix it, and Drakken isn't completely sure he'd _want_ her to fix it if she could. Stress, after all, is not a weakness. Not necessarily. The best mad scientists are always a little tortured. . . aren't they?

At the very least, the world has never been won through relaxation.

"Well then, it sounds like you are long overdue for a night of TLC," Mother says, using the way-hip acronym for _tender loving care_. "And I don't want to hear any protest from you."

Drakken doesn't have any protests to put forth, which frightens him. His armor is running at such close proximity to her warmth.

And yet he knows that if he steps out of it tonight, he will be as good as dead. Which is not very good.

As Drakken quivers under the throw that smells of mothballs and kindness, Mother rises from the couch and walks away. The with-Mother panic pendulums over to without-Mother panic and back again when she returns seconds later with the remote and clicks the TV on.

"How about we just watch some television for a bit?" Mother says. "I've still got the videocassette of _Robin Hood_. I know that was your favorite movie when you were a boy."

His favorite movie when he was a boy was that high-budget sci-fi one where the poor unsuspecting boy swallows spores that poison his blood as it speeds down its roadways, through every vessel until there's not one droplet left uninfected, hijack his joints to take him places he doesn't want to go, inundate his brain with their own sinister agenda. The boy begins to spread it to all he comes in contact with, until spored people threaten to wipe out the rest of the human race. It's up to the dashingly handsome hero, brilliant but non-nerdy in a much-envied pair of contact lenses, to save the day and purge the host humans.

They all come out of the purge the same way. Chilled. Exhausted. Baggy-eyed. Sides heaving, feeling like they've lost five pounds overnight, which is not the wonderful experience the magazines at the Smarty Mart checkout would have you believe it to be.

Exactly the way Drakken felt yesterday when his eyes opened to the sight of Kim Possible's gaze demanding his survival.

Drakken exhales, and he could swear the sigh mists in the chilled air around his head. He wants to watch _Robin Hood_ instead.

"Sounds great, Mother," he says.

Mother beams and pops the tape into the VCR's hungry slot. They will be obsolete in a few years, those same magazines say. DVD players are the way of the future. More newfangled tech that Drakken will be forced to either steal or go without.

He reassures himself with the fact that soon the future will be Drakken and Shego, all Drakken and Shego, and nothing will be too expensive for them and their loved ones.

The TV awakens in a fuzz of black, with white lines trisecting the screen and the word TRACKING blinking naggingly in the lower left corner. As out-of-date as VCRs may be, they're still too young to hearken back to Drakken's childhood. Not that his childhood is much of a sanctuary, anyway.

And yet there's something about the slightly distorted picture that loads first and the mildly garbled sound that soon follows, something about them that hushes the tantrum being thrown in Drakken's insides. His elbows and knees are rubbed back into feeling.

Mother sinks beside him on the couch, kneading the throw with the tenderness of a loving cat. The rooster begins to strum and sing. Drakken's eyelids slacken as if the optometrist has just released them from those nasty little clamps.

From afar, the light beckons to him with promises. But Drakken still loathes it for all the times it's let him down, all those happy endings yanked out of his reach right before his fingertips brushed them. It cannot give him everything, cannot give him _any_ thing, not in the end.

He wouldn't fit in that narrow window of light, anyway. Not with his temper and his heaps of hate and all his jagged edges.

A stun gun, though. . . he likes the sound of that.

* * *

By the time _Robin Hood_ is over, there is a flannel feeling inside Drakken that has overridden his frost. His eyes are heavy-laden and beginning to droop.

"There's my sleepy bunny, all ready for his night-night routine."

Mother's voice bumps lightly against him, the way Commodore Puddles does when he asks to play, and yet Drakken's achy back stiffens, one vertebrae at at time, and ice suffuses his nervous system once again. There is coziness here, yes, but sleep is such a gruesome prospect. Any number of things could be lying in wait for him to enter REM.

Police with guns, _real_ guns, yelling, "Freeze! Hands in the air!" Warmonga with her staff over her head, tensing for the kill - _any_ kill, she's not picky about who. Diablos lasering destruction across well-paved streets at the behest of an all-too-familiar stranger. The suffocating blackness of prison, broken only by the glint of light across smuggled-past-the-guards weapons. Inexplicable black clouds hovering in nothing, menacing him with their emptiness.

Drakken realizes he has braced a hand on each opposite shoulder and begun to sway back and forth in his seated position. Bodies in motion tend to stay in motion, after all, and _this_ body _needs_ to stay in motion or his belly button will morph into a black hole and slowly pull the rest of him inside. He thinks he saw that happen to someone once. . .

Oh. Right. It was Kim Possible. Another one of his brilliant, doomed plans.

"Don't you start with me, Drew Lipsky," Mother says before Drakken can utter a peep. "A man needs sleep - especially a man as overextended as you."

Drakken grunts something in the realm of agreement. His head wouldn't shake now if someone bribed it to. He is vaguely pondering why Kim Possible didn't appear in his list of potential nightmares as he reports, "I forgot to bring any pajamas."

Mother's lips purse, pinning in a scolding, he can tell. "Oh, well - not a problem, not a problem. Just at least go into the bathroom and freshen up."

Drakken gives her a long, exaggerated nod and, when he can stall no longer, heaves himself to his feet and down the hall toward their lone bathroom. His surroundings are as wavy as the footage from the first few seconds of the videocassette, and yet he notices he can still navigate this route with very little challenge. It is preserved somewhere in his memory of precious things.

The bathroom is so spotless and pure with the fragrance of cinnamon soap, he'd feel bad for even setting a (messy) foot into it. If his nerves hadn't entered Emergency Shutdown, where no one but Drakken can even be considered.

See, this is the part where Shego would ask how that's any different than normal.

It's different because "freshen up" usually means "take a shower," and that Drakken will not do. He may never take another shower again, not after prison, not after standing exposed among a mob of other men whose cold naked strength bragged they could do to him whatever they pleased.

Still, when he glances in the mirror - always a risky move - Drakken concedes that _some_ thing must be done. His hair hangs in chunks, the ends like torn construction paper, the middles knotted and snarled from salt water and a slow, crude drying. Even his eyebrow is standing on end, giving his eyes a look of bloodshot mania. It is a different species than his usual messiness, and when Drakken sticks his tongue out at his reflection, he can see the dry taste buds sticking up like warts on a toad.

Drakken compromises by leaning over the side of the bathtub and rubbing shampoo into a lather until his scalp no longer has that oily cling. The beat to "Lather, Rinse, and Obey!" sticks in his head, throbbing like a popcorn kernel caught between your back molars.

It at least earns him another half-hour of wakefulness. Mother has always refused to let him go to bed with wet hair, no matter how many reports he shows her have that have declared it no additional health risk - which makes Drakken wonder, sometimes, if his genius exists in a vacuum where it is only real to him. He sits up with her through a late-night rerun of _Hogan's Heroes_ while she dabs at his neck with a towel.

The credits roll, and Mother looks pointedly at her scuffed wristwatch. "Well, Drewbie, we'd both better be getting to bed."

"Already?" Drakken scrapes together a chuckle, which immediately goes out as though lacking oxygen.

Mother's face slants into a frown. "Baby, it's nearly eleven."

"The night is still young, Mother!" Drakken says. "We could - we could always - err -" He fades into a yawn.

"That's what I thought," Mother says, shaking her head. She seems to be wearing her X-ray goggles again, though they're clouded by worry now, and something pinches in Drakken's heart. Her anguish may not register through Emergency Shutdown, but it matters. It matters so, so much.

"Are you afraid?" she asks at last.

The lie is already chomping at the bit, fully intending to launch itself, in the farthest thing from a boom, the minute he opens his mouth. And Drakken can't escape the notion that it will somehow halve his height and regress him to a kindergartener, even though he's an eminent scientist who built a de-aging machine and he _knows_ it doesn't work that way.

He merely nods.

"Of your dreams?" Mother presses.

He nods again.

Mother mewls her sympathy. "Oh, my little lamb. . ."

Drakken stares down at the shapeless line of himself somewhere under that mountainous throw. She will never see a predator when she looks at him, will she?

Does he want her to?

"I can only promise you one thing there, Drewbie," Mother says. She sits, rearranges her short legs into a practical fold. "Even the worst dreams end. And when you wake up, I will be here. I will protect you - every time."

Drakken blinks down at her through a blur. Of course she will. She was the only _always_ in his life, and she continues to be, even now, long after the roles should have switched and made _him_ the provider. His fledgling guilt makes a cameo appearance.

"All. Right." He takes big gulps between the two words.

Mother wipes a droplet of water from his scarred cheek, a location that always gentles her grasp. "Your room's all set up downstairs."

His room. Of course. Still in the basement. Mother moved most of his toys and childhood books and school art projects up to the attic after he went to college, but she has never refurbished the room into a guestroom.

The resolve drains from Drakken's limbs. He just wants to rest his head against all his mother's soft lumps and cry.

So he does.

Well, technically, he's not _crying_. Nothing falls from his eyes, just weird noises coming out of his throat and jerking him sharply against Mother's flowered dress. "You're welcome," she murmurs.

Drakken braves the trek down the stairs, to a land musty and twenty degrees cooler. When he swings open the door that was once his, though, he can tell the room's been freshly cleaned, the mattress shaken out and the shelves dusted for. . . well, dust, of course.

In many ways it's just as he left it. There's the orangish glob on the carpet right below the bed leftover from a chemical spill decades ago; the half-open closet; the desk where he crouched over his homework every weeknight for twelve years. The faded blue sheets are turned down at the corners, and Drakken slides in between them. They remind him of the aloe vera he rubs on skin burnt from exploding machinery.

His pillow mushrooms out behind his head, and some whimsical, nonscientific part of Drakken imagines microscopic people sleeping on clouds. He brings his hands into a pulse-slowing curl against his sternum. Thoughts of police and threatening dark clouds vanish from his mind.

He is home. He is safe.

The thoughts are so foreign Drakken is sure he must already be dreaming. And they are so beautiful they almost hurt, because he knows staying here is not an option, not for any significant length of time.

 _Destiny. . . not fullfilled yet. Must. . . conquer planet._

He's almost forgotten how soothing it can be to let your eyes go ahead and close. There's having your eyes closed to think or shutting them to block out something horrible. And then there's the deep, restful fashion of closing where all your eyelid muscles twitch and then relax, and you sign off for the day.

It's this he slips into now.

In his last moments of wakefulness, Drakken vows, fingers tightly intertwined, that he will make all of this up to his mother. He will create a legacy for himself that will do her proud.

He will give her the world.

* * *

But first, he will give her breakfast in bed.

The classic Mother's Day staple. And while Drakken is aware that he _probably_ can't make up for twenty-four misspent Mother's Days in one morning, let it be known that Dr. Drakken is no slouch in the kitchen! And she has more than earned it.

Drakken decides this as soon as he opens his eyes (painfully - forgot to take his contacts out last night) from a night of dreams that didn't press enough to leave an imprint on his memory. His spine feels younger when he stretches it out. The bed squeaks under him, that same off-key note it's always squeaked thanks to a busted box spring, and it takes a glance down at his lab coat for Drakken to remember he is, in fact, still inhabiting the twenty-first century.

Not that he'd _want_ to go back to his childhood. It was a dreadful hybrid of brutality and loneliness, and it. . it. . .

. . . it seems to have never ended. He's still leeching off Mother's compassion. Still griping ferociously when things don't go his way. Still tossing and turning all night like a colicky infant. The only difference would be that none of his clothes would fit anymore.

Drakken pats the mattress under him, so weakly it doesn't even protest. _All right, and at least I don't wet the bed anymore._

It's a small consolation, but it's enough to throw Drakken's shoulders back and drive him upstairs, where he's delighted to see Mother hasn't woken yet. He prepares and consumes a bowl of Frosted Flakes and then packs himself away. It is all about Mother today.

The importance of such a mission should make his movements clean and sharp, like Shego's, but to his own disgust, Drakken finds himself still moving like a puberty-addled orangutan as he cracks three eggs into a glass bowl and lightens them with milk. He beats the mixture, imagining he is doling out punches to his enemies - his faceless enemies, since Kim Possible's face still won't properly download into the role she's played for so long.

Apparently, he does it with a little too much passion. A glob rockets off his mixing spoon and Drakken has to fling out an arm to _intercept_ it (as they say in football - or is it baseball?) before it lands on the burner he flipped on to warm the skillet.

Drakken pours the resulting glop into the skillet and stirs it with one of Mother's once-white spatulas. Back and forth he pushes it, back and forth, until it is as scrambled as the contents of his mind, only much fluffier and prettier in a buttery yellow. He ladles the happy lumps onto a plate, which is in turn loaded onto a small grayish tray.

Next he procures the butter needed for toast - Mother prefers plain, simple toast, lightly dusted with cinnamon, to succulent powdered French. No accounting for taste, Drakken supposes.

And her cabinets are so organized. To be fair, Drakken's own cabinets have an orderliness to them - well, they have a _system_ , at any rate, and it _would_ work if the henchmen ever cottoned on to the concept of putting things back where they got them! Mother has no roommates to mess up her system, and he locates her griddle right away.

Retrieving it is another matter altogether. Drakken has to flatten himself to the cabinet floor and repeatedly clangs his head until he begins to feel like an old-fashioned bell in the heart of a clock, rung seven times to signal seven o'clock.

 _It's for Mother, it's for Mother, it's for Mother._

At last, the griddle is resting on the countertop, and Drakken moves on to rooting through the freezer for bacon. He finds a package, checks the expiration date, and then, realizing he doesn't know today's date, opens the package and performs his own investigation. No green spots, and since it doesn't smell very exciting, he decides it's still in date.

Fat bursts on the griddle like miniature fireworks.

Not always quite miniature enough. There are several instances where the grease flicks off the griddle and stings Drakken's skin. He chalks it up to an occupational hazard, which is harder to do when you're sucking through your teeth.

 _It's for Mother, it's for Mother, it's for Mother._

Drakken snaps the griddle off before the bacon can become more than _slightly_ blackened and tongs the strips onto the plate as well. A blank piece of bread rests next to them, and Drakken picks it up and drops it into the toaster, pulling the handle down and setting the timer to one-and-a-half minutes - Mother likes her toast warm but pale.

Though its pop-up time is on schedule, it still startles Drakken. His elbow jostles the open milk jug, leaving white droplets on the counter that Drakken hastily mops with his sleeve. Snatching the tongs again, he whisks the bread onto the plate beside the eggs. They're getting cold; he should have cooked them last.

Drakken butters the toast in wide, determined strokes only to discover that the cinnamon-sugar canister is empty. He has to refill it himself, and the sugar is in the cabinet just to the right of the refrigerator, the cinnamon in the cabinet just to the _left_. Even Drakken's arms cannot span such a gap, and he ends up being forced to make an awkward leap to nab the cinnamon. Fortunately, none of the cupboards are too high in their house - _Mother's_ house, that is - and he doesn't have far to fall when he slips.

Then there is the matter of the sugar bag, which hasn't been opened yet and which, as far as Drakken is concerned, seems to be reinforced with surgical stitches. Shego has cracked open government vaults with less trouble.

Pain crackles its way up Drakken's arms and surfaces as sweat. For the first time in the last forty-eight hours, he is far too warm. He gives the bag another frenzied yank, and it tears, launching a mushroom cloud of sugar across the floor and into his hair.

Drakken isn't sure whether to laugh or scream. He takes inventory on the bag itself - still plenty of sugar left - and settles on laughing. He shakes some sugar into the canister and adds cinnamon in sprinkles, strong generous sprinkles just the way Mother taught him.

Soon, the toast is as close to perfect as it is going to get. Drakken finds a glass shaped like Mother, short and sweetly rounded. _Coffee or orange juice? Orange juice or coffee? Hmmmmm. . ._

After several vacillating minutes, Drakken decides on orange juice because it's instant. He _does_ flick on the coffeemaker as a backup. The pot is placed and he's pouring the grounds, and that's when a contact lens decides to go out on him. Drakken swipes his left hand over the sudden aquarium-view he's now stuck in while his right hand continues to pour.

When Drakken's vision clears at last, he fills the Mother-shaped glass with the orange juice she so loves, stopping at approximately two-thirds. Any higher, and the risk of collateral splashing will double. He calculated it one night when he was bored.

And as satisfied as he is with his work, something is still missing. Drakken rubs his chin and paces the floor, granulated crystals crunching under his boots. Then an Archimedes-worthy bolt hits him.

Flowers! Not for eating, of course - though Drakken has heard some varieties are edible. For decoration purposes. He may be a notoriously bad-tempered supervillain, but he still has an eye for beauty.

The thought sort of itches in Drakken's brain like a three-day-old scab. He's out the door and onto the lawn before it can stir up anything more.

There are a few daffodils and tulips and a couple of other things he cannot name poking up from his mother's flowerbed, yet those are, Drakken remembers from his childhood, Not To Be Touched. Besides, he'd need shears to even snip through the stems. He settles for a clump of dandelions that have sprouted among the scrubby grass, freckles on a summer-ready face.

Mother's vases are all occupied by plants she's been wintering indoors, so Drakken runs about a quarter-inch of water into an old plastic cup, patterned with spaceships and robots, and sticks the dandelions inside. It goes on the other side of the tray, and he's glad he picked dandelions. Their color scheme perfectly complements the eggs and the orange juice.

Drakken rubs his hands together, breathes in deeply, and lets it out in a rush. Willing his hands to be steady, he picks up the tray and starts down the hall.

Each step is fraught with peril. Drakken concentrates on his path the way he would do with a highly volatile chemical mix - with every scrap of attention he has. His heartbeat jabs his head with a desperate chorus - _Don't. Spill. Don't. Spill. I. Will. Not. Spill._

And he doesn't.

Mother's door never clicked completely shut last night, so pushing it open only requires one finger. Drakken enters, working out an equation for balancing quietness with efficiency. The mesmerizing sunrays, washing in through the narrow dusty windows and turning Mother's hair a golden pink, also slow his footfalls.

She's still asleep. What does he do? Does he set the tray on her bed and leave? Reset the alarm for five minutes? Stand there, hold the tray, and hope she wakes up on her own?

Will his arms hold out? Already they're starting to cramp, just as they used to when it took too long for a teacher to call on him, only now he doesn't have a free hand to support them. Drakken lets out a hushed whimper.

This, as it turns out, is all the alarm Mother needs.

Her eyelids twitch open. Her lips part. There's a pillow crease on her face, which of course wears no makeup yet, and a delicate bubble at the corner of her mouth.

Drakken's circuits overload. It's been quite a while since they were forced to process raw love, as potent as raw onion.

"Hi, Mother," he says, nudging the tray forward. He can scarcely recognize his own voice; it's as squeaky as the busted spring on his bed.

Mother's eyes take a second to focus. When they do, they blow up like balloons and immediately begin to glisten, then to overflow. Drakken squirms, because he's spent his whole life making her cry, and her tears were always so much worse than her punishments.

Yet only a fool could confuse those with these.

Mother props herself up, elbowing her single scrawny pillow back against the headboard. "What on _Earth_?" she says.

The tray is rattling as Drakken sets it down, more so than simple physics should allow. His first thought is to say, _I've brought you breakfast in bed_ , but that is already blatant, and he's not sure it answers the question his mother is asking, anyway.

"I wanted to say. . . thank you," Drakken says. "For. . . home. . . and kind. . . and safe. . . and nice."

Shego would be going into septic shock over his grammar, Drakken knows. His mother, on the other hand, gazes upon him as though she is witnessing the splitting of the atom - which wasn't actually much to see if you didn't happen to have a supremely powerful microscope. There has never been any need with her to poke your words with a stick to see if they're functional.

"You've been such a good mother," Drakken says. "And I know I haven't been much of a son, so I was - I was just - "

Mother eases the tray over to the other, empty side of her bed. She moves broadly, like he does, only with so much more agility; not a single frill of egg spills off the plate. "Ohhh, Drewbie. _Ohhh_ , my angel." She reaches out and chucks Drakken under the chin, the way one does to silly little dogs with painted toenails.

He is the furthest thing from an angel, and yet Drakken can almost feel the steam rising from his skin. It must, he decides, be due to the minimal physical contact. He coughs.

Mother lifts her juice glass and takes a long, eyes-closed sip. "Oh, this is scrumptious, dear." She says it as if he has squeezed the oranges himself rather than merely held the container sideways over a glass for a few seconds.

"You should eat the eggs first. They're what I made first, so they're going to get cold. . . first." It's the only thing Drakken can think to say.

Mother's face takes on that shine that appears to amplify each of her tiny features until they are all Drakken sees. "I take it this means you slept soundly?" she says around the forkful of eggs she stabs in. "I didn't hear you tossing and turning much last night."

A non-scientist would attribute that to maternal auditory magic rather than how ventilation shafts distribute sound waves.

"No bad dreams?" Mother continues.

Drakken's neck is bolted too tightly to let his head shake, so he half-shrugs instead. "None that I remember."

"Well, thank the Lord for that," Mother says. She aims the fork for the eggs again. "Did you eat breakfast already?"

"Yes," Drakken says. Her look could perforate a skull. "No, really, I have, Mother. Had a bowl of cereal. Cross my heart." He draws an _X_ over his chest, which is feeling wider and more stable inside than it has for a very long time.

"Well, all right, if you cross your heart." Mother gives the fork a playful wag in his direction. "Drewbie, I meant what I said last night. I really don't mind taking care of you."

 _Boy, do you_ ever _not mind._

The truth of that is heavy around him. "I know that!" Drakken sputters, and his head does shake this time. "And I don't mind paying you back for it! I ain't no freeloader! As the hip young things today say," he adds at the picture of utter confusion she sends his way.

Mother's eyes mist again.

For once, the silence that falls between them is comfortable. Drakken watches her small round hands as they move effortlessly from fork to toast, watches her jaw muscles as she chews the bacon without one complaint about its burnt edges, watches her throat as she swallows with such tranquility. When she is done, she dabs at her lips with the napkin, and Drakken snatches up the tray like the waiter he was for exactly three weeks one summer.

"I'll get that for you, ma'am," he says, voice even lower than usual. Drakken carries the tray out to the dishwasher. Mother follows behind him.

This is unfortunate, because when Drakken rounds the corner into the kitchen, he sees that it looks rather like the Battle of Gettysburg has been fought there - well, if the soldiers threw handfuls of sugar at each other and bled coffee.

 _Coffee!_

He must have put too much in the coffeemaker, because bittersweet brown liquid is boiling over the sides and streaming in rivulets out from the pot. The floor is littered with sugar. The countertops are speckled, in sundry places, with cinnamon, dried bacon grease, and egg-yolk runoff.

"Yipes!" Drakken lunges across the room and yanks the coffeemaker's dial back to its off position and then quickly dances backward to avoid the hot mess dribbling toward him.

Mother stands in the doorway, her hand lifted as though to stave off what he sincerely hopes is laughter.

Drakken's nervous grin flicks on as automatically as a hotel's NO VACANCY sign. "I'll clean this up," he says quietly.

And he does.

* * *

Mother sends him off with a new toothbrush.

"How did you _know_?" Drakken gapes at her, at this woman who told him not to play with his food and bandaged the wounds she didn't know were from bullies and should have long stopped amazing him by now. His old toothbrush is graying and balding so fast Drakken expects it to have a midlife crisis any day now.

"It'd been a couple months since your last one," Mother says. Unquestionable, she tucks it into his slender pocket, pats it, and gives him a hug that he squirms out of. Drakken sees in that moment that her offer still stands. That any time he wants to, he can come back to her and snuggle down between her clean sheets and be coddled to his heart's content.

There's a timid little boy inside him who would have been all too happy to take her up on that. Last night. Today Drakken feels a little stronger. Not strong enough to conquer the world, but strong enough to wrench away from a hug rather than tolerate it.

Or worse yet, crave it.

Drakken hoists himself, creaking legs and all, into the hovercraft's front seat. To stay behind and bask in his mother's never-ending devotion would be to canonize the words of James Possible, spoken as though to a child:

 _You'll always just be Drew Lipsky - the science student who couldn't make the grade._

No, James is wrong. They're all wrong. There's a man in there, too, a strapping intellectual type, stuffed far down deep like that loathsome clown no one wants to see spring out of the jack-in-the-box. James will eat his words, and Drakken hopes they taste like burnt rubber - no, spoiled potatoes - no, cod liver oil - well, whatever the nastiest taste in the world is!

Drakken drops his forehead down onto the hovercraft's dashboard, setting off an air-horn alarm. He pushes frantically at every button until he finds the one that sends it back into silence. "Sorry," he tells Mother.

"Drewbie," she says, coming around to the side of the hovercraft, "I wouldn't trade you for all the tea in China."

"Is that a lot?" Drakken supposes he could stand to research each nation's assets if he wants to be a good despot.

"More than you can count." Mother pecks his cheek, and he's able to smile weakly in return.

No, he shall not return to his mother's basement and live out his days as a whispered-about college dropout. Not in the same town as the overachieving Possibles. He must prove himself, only every time he gets close, something capsizes.

By choice, Drakken has been inexplicably empowered the night of the Diablos and found himself pitted against Shego by Warmonga and her weapons of extraterrestrial sharpness. Now, by chance, a whole day and night of his life have spiraled into oblivion. If he'd had a moment of victory in that time, he wouldn't be able to either revel in it or remember it, which is of course the whole point in _having_ a moment of victory!

That's not what rumbles the Frosted Flakes in his belly, though. Neither of the previous near-misses left Drakken feeling as if someone else commandeered his hand and scissored gaps into his memory like World War II correspondence censors. What could he have done, what was he capable of, that could be worse than any crime he'd already committed?

Drakken shudders, recalling only the coppery feel of salt water searing his nasal passages. There! _That's_ what he hopes James's words taste like.

Because the mighty James Possible _was_ wrong, as far as these incidents were concerned: Drakken was lightyears away from being Drew Lipsky.

And he isn't truly sure which outcome frightens him more.

 _Being a pansy, of course!_ Drakken tells himself after a frozen moment, settling the hackles and the Frosted Flakes that are beginning to stir again. Not a _literal_ pansy - because what are the odds of him ever turning into a flower? - but a wuss, a mama's boy, and every obscene insult the men in prison hurled at him.

And _lightyears away_. That's brilliant. Maybe he should share it with James; maybe Mr. Fancy Pants Rocket Scientist would understand astronomy talk. Nothing could be scarier than a world where he never learns the error of his ways, where his daughter still -

Drakken's thoughts skip over Kim Possible, like there's a scratch on his mental file disk, right over to Mother's image. He thrusts his keys into the ignition, spins them, and the hovercraft's lift seems stronger than normal. With a wave to his mother and a thickened command to himself not to look back, he takes to the skies.

Mother.

People look at her and they see the husband who ran away and the son who became a supervillain, and they jump to conclusions. Conclusions that should be illegal, conclusions he burns to wipe from their minds.

And wipe them he shall, even if he has to bring out the brain-tapping machine that finally won him a success. (Who _cares_ if it still nauseates him to look at it?) She will become the mother of the smartest, bravest conqueror the world has ever known, and she will be revered. He'll be able to give her the life any fair sovereign would have given her to begin with.

Not until he is halfway across the ocean does it occur to Drakken that she never asked him what he was doing out of prison.

 **~Stole "I wouldn't want to be a kid again 'cuz none of my clothes would fit" from _DuckTales_. Long live Launchpad McQuack!~**


	35. Burying the Hatchet

**~Short and sweet this time. First time writing for Kim in a while. Hope I haven't lost the knack.**

 **Big thanks to my reviewers, including guest Lionheart. Sorry-not-sorry for the feels-punch. ;) But, seriously, thank you.~**

At least the foundation was still intact. The damage-survey people had told Mom and Dad that was a good thing.

 _Plus, the whole lucky-to-escape-with-our-lives thing makes it PRETTY hard to whine._

Kim Possible folded her arms across the dusky-blue tank top that Tara had outgrown since last summer and been more than happy to give to Kim at their take-two graduation ceremony. The air was scented with the fresh-cut wood of the first few skeletal beams that had been attached to the foundation so it wasn't just a slab of empty gray anymore. At _that_ stage, all Kim could _do_ was wander from one corner to the next and kick debris out of the way and remember.

That was where the kitchen was, all pale-sunbeam-yellow with its booth that surrounded the table instead of chairs, where Dad had fixed her more babyish bacon-and-eggs smiley faces than Kim could count, right straight up through sophomore year. There was the living room, with the couch Ron had spent his entire kid- and teen-hood sprawled across, watching everything from _Snowman Hank_ to _Agony County_. There were the stairs that led up to her room with her clothes and her books and the Cuddle Buddy collection she'd stashed in the closet on her first day of high school. . .

There weren't too many things that put the thickness behind Kim's eyes, but it piled up like a crush of Black Friday shoppers every time she let herself think like that. So she didn't.

They had a framework now, and that was all Kim had ever needed to set her head straight.

She glanced around at the hodgepodge of people who swarmed the lot where her house used to be. Mom and Dad were picking their way around the wooden outline, Dad ducking under low ceilings that weren't there yet while Mom created imaginary picture frames with her hands. "Let's see. We should keep the kitchen where it was, I think," she was saying. "Maybe move your study a little closer to the dining room. . ."

Dad put an arm around Mom's waist and squeezed her up to his side. "I've always thought we could use a bigger laundry room," he said.

Ron was sprawled - adorably - on the grass with the Tweebs, sucking water from nearly-drained bottles. Dr. Freeman and Vivian Porter discussed wiring options as Dr. Freeman gave the lawn a once-over with his auto-mower, which Barkin stepped over with a bag of cement slung across each shoulder. At least two or three members of the cheerleading squad had been over every day of construction, bringing a plate of cookies or a platter of cold cuts or, once, a whole watermelon Marcella's mom had snagged on sale.

As familiar as Kim was getting with the entire-planet-off-its-orbit feeling, she still couldn't keep her mouth from falling open when Bonnie Rockwaller had flounced her miniskirt over one evening after summer school got out. She mostly ran back and forth bringing glasses of Mrs. Stoppable's homemade lemonade to the workers, which was fine with Kim. If Bonnie had taken up manual labor, Kim would've KNOWN a body-swap had taken place when she wasn't looking.

Wade looked up from the 3-D hologram he was fashioning from the blueprints and nudged Kim in the ribs. "Drakken alert," he said, his voice trailing along behind him. He'd never quite figured out whether he was supposed to be afraid of Drakken or what.

Honestly, Kim herself wasn't sure at this point. Drakken had made a few appearances over the summer, lending his "genius expertise" to the rebuild. And no one had been brain-tapped yet.

The words SUICIDE WATCH flashed across Kim's mind, drying up any urge to grab a broom and chase him away. "Hi, Drakken," she said with the most welcoming flourish she could manage.

Drakken skittered up to them in the construction-worker clothes that seemed to have been made for a man about fifty percent bigger - maybe the man he'd been before prison - hard hat rattling on his head like a lid slapped onto the wrong size jar. He tugged at his spiky ponytail.

Kim stifled a grin. She still wasn't used to Drakken being shy in front of an audience. It was a welcome variation on his usual preening-peacock strut.

"Hello, Kim Possible." He pronounced her name without a snarl, and it couldn't have sounded more un-Drakken if he'd said it in soprano. "I have arrived. So, errrr, don't be alarmed if you look up and see me, 'kay?"

" _So_ not the drama," Kim said with a flick of her wrist.

"Good, good." Drakken turned to Wade and stuck out an itsy-bitsy hand. "Hello, tech child. I just realized we've never actually met face-to-face. I'm Dr. Drakken."

Wade stuck his pudgy paw into Drakken's like he was poking it into a beehive. "Wade Load," he said. "Um, nice to see you. Without a ready-and-waiting doom ray, that is."

The corners of Drakken's mouth slid into an I-haven't-decided-yet-whether-to-smile-or-not curl. "Wade!" he cried with a snap of his fingers. "I knew it was something short and cute."

Kim tried to prevent her backbone from stiffening when that snapped finger went up. Her Drakken-feelings weren't just mixed - they were blender-churned. She didn't like to think of herself as a grudger, but she knew it would be a LONG time before she'd be able to trust those energy surges he got in his eyes.

"Is your family here, too?" Drakken said to Wade.

"My mom is." Wade pointed to the woman whose golden oblong earrings were visible even from this distance. "My dad's gone a lot. On business."

Drakken looked like he'd been shot. There were still whole layers of crud on him that Kim didn't even _know_ about. Which made the reformation thing even more amazing.

"Right." Drakken shifted his thumbs to the belt that was already just barely supporting his mega-baggy jeans. "Well, I'll be off to wherever I'm needed, then!" He waved his hand as if he were about to drop a handkerchief, old-movie-style, and swaggered away, as much as anybody could swagger on those pipsqueak legs. "Ta-ta!"

Kim waited until he was out of earshot to guffaw.

Knowing Drakken, he'd get all carried away and want to start building them a mansion or something. He did nothing halfway. She pitied the worker who'd end up having to convince him to rein it in.

Kim watched Drakken's swallowed-in-plaid back retreat with what she hoped wasn't _too_ much suspicion. She really, really wanted to believe in him, and ever since the alien invasion he _had_ given off a different vibe, one he hadn't had even on his best hair day as a villain. Whether that made her job any easier or not was still up in the air.

But in what Ron would call a mucho-bizarro way, she wanted him to be okay.

Kim's shoulder blades pinched. She'd had to get pretty good at detecting when she wasn't alone, and right now she could definitely sense someone else's gaze traveling right through her and out onto Drakken. She spun around.

It was Dad.

She watched the knee-jerk scowl rise to his face and shut it down. He shook his head - trying to clear it away, Kim could tell - but it wasn't going that easily. Framed by the bony promise of a someday-house, wood shavings twisting at his feet, and his eyebrows crawling together over a glint of actual hatred, he looked like a completely different man than the one who still insisted on kissing her good night before bed.

Justified?

Totes. Even a bit beyond touching, considering it was on her behalf. But it bit at Kim's heart anyway.

Drakken must've felt it, too, because he glanced backward just time for his eyes to collide with Dad's. Kim was waiting for the chest to punch forward, thrusting the rest of his thin body backward, but it never did. Instead, Drakken blanched blue-white, blinking at a faster speed than Ron's rest-in-pieces scooter ever broke. He held one hand up in another wave, only this one barely lifted before curling back into a tension-bunched fist.

Kim had seen those fists furious before, and they weren't now. Still, who knew what could happen if Dad pressed the wrong button?

Fortunately, Mom returned from touring the back half of the framework then. She dazzled both Dad and Drakken with that expression that could pour cold water on a dogfight. All of Dad's tight lines relaxed, and he bent to press a kiss to the top of her bob.

Drakken took that moment to slink away sideways. Air puffed out of his lips as if he'd just been pinned down by Steel Toe. At that moment, he was the very image of villain-Drakken in defeat

It may have been the first time Kim didn't thrill to see it.

Which was how it went for a while - Dad's jaw muscles twitching like he was working a toothpick from side to side. Drakken didn't HAVE any jaw muscles, as far as Kim could tell, but his ginormous chin was definitely on the quivery side.

That was why Kim's own jaw plunged nearly past her neckline when Drakken stood up from the board he'd just finished slopping white paint onto and walked straight up to Dad. Drakken scrubbed his jeans with his hands as if they oozed sweat even through the I-think-I'm-rugged brown gloves that were swimming on hands not much bigger than Kim's.

Dad didn't say anything. He didn't have to. The silence that smoldered around him was deafening enough.

Drakken cleared his throat with a noise that would have been right at home coming from Rufus. It matched the first few attempts-at-words that sputtered out of him.

Still nothing from Dad. He stood with his fists tightened and hanging at his waist. It was strangely like watching Cousin Larry and his pals getting ready to duke it out at the Robot Rumble - sans robots.

Kim knew these guys - either one of them could have _maybe_ fought their way out of a wet paper bag on their BEST day. Still, Dad, with his six-foot height, medium-sized muscles, and little bit of a pot, was bigger than Drakken. Not a lot, but enough to matter. Kim cringed to herself. With Drakken unarmed, Dad could easily kick his backside straight out into the street.

And, Kim realized with a start, that wasn't what she wished for at all. She ducked into the semi-shade cast by the one section of the outline that had been developed beyond barebones wood and wondered if she should go for Mom. Kim had been known to negotiate hostage sitches in the span of a lunch period, but Mom was way better at talking down the man she'd married.

"Hello, Drew," Dad said. Normally he rocked civility. With Drakken - not so much.

Kim hesitated slightly in the shadows. She could get in _so_ much trouble for eavesdropping, but she got the feeling she'd better stay, just in case Dad decided to go after Drakken with a revolver or something.

Plus, you didn't exactly _have_ to eavesdrop to hear Drakken once he started thundering. His "Errr, yes - hello, James," was louder than the whine of the ultra-strength drill coming from behind Kim, and it poked her head back around the corner.

The arrogance and the tough veneer had evaporated and left Drakken's face smoother, softer. Kim wouldn't have been sure she'd met the man if it weren't for the little fidgety dance his fingers immediately began. "Look, I know you hate me," Drakken said to his sloppily-tied shoelaces.

Kim was sure Dad choked.

"And I know why, too," Drakken said.

"Oh, you do?" Dad's voice was as hard and sharp-but-flat as a piece of peanut brittle.

Drakken nodded with the certainty of a know-it-all kindergartener. "Because I tried to hurt your little girl."

Kim squeezed the almost-wall until its waxy translucent covering puckered. The unremoved feeling of it under her fingertips was the only thing that argued for this NOT being a dream. It was so far from reality as she'd always known it, the dancing hippos from _Fantasia_ couldn't have made it more surreal.

"And I know how I'd feel if anyone tried to hurt Shego," Drakken said. His Adam's apple seemed to have doubled in size with the lump Kim knew he was straining against.

The name that had always turned Kim's backbone rigid didn't this time.

Everything on her father's face had stopped moving. It was a plaster mask that Kim half-expected to see cracks appear in when his mouth split open again. "So. . . what are you saying?" Dad asked.

Drakken swallowed hard. The angular cheekbone facing Kim nearly poked through his skin. "I'm apologizing."

This was about the point where Shego would have said, _And aren't you doing a bang-up job of it, too?_ But Kim shoved her own mental sarcasm aside and edged closer. She wanted to hear what Dad had to say to that.

Nothing, as it turned out. Dad grunted, the way Drakken himself might do if you interrupted one of his tangents, and cut a sideways glance toward the outline of the living room.

"The way you apologized to me at my - at the UN ceremony?" Drakken ventured.

He didn't mention knowing it had to have been Kim's idea. She breathed a silent _thank you_ and kept watching.

Dad didn't even grunt this time. He stood in full statue imitation while Drakken said, "And you remember what I said to you then?"

"Remind me," Dad said. The peanut brittle was still hard enough for somebody to chip a tooth.

Drakken rolled his waistband in and held it there in a pastel-knuckled clutch. "I said I couldn't forgive you yet, but I believed you were sorry. . . and that I would try. Do you think. . . do you think you could do the same for me?"

There was something so hopeful about it that a thin ache spread through Kim's chest. She riveted her gaze to her father. Dad's eyes were still cut into little slices that were a worse fit than Drakken's pants, and he slowly shifted them down to where Drakken's abrupt fragility waited. Kim watched the pink tongue slide across the blue lips.

Yeah, Kim had had this dream before. But every time, she'd already woken up by this part.

 _Please, Daddy. Please._

Finally, Dad let out a breath Kim could hear even from her distant vantage point and leveled his eyes down at Drakken, who'd re-tensed in the crippling silence. "I can _try_ ," he said.

The nervous energy slipped right off Drakken, to the point where Kim thought he might slide right out of his oversized flannel shirt. "Yes, well, err. Thank you," he said, without a boom anywhere in earshot. "Thank you kindly. Much appreciated."

With a straight-off-a-British-soap-opera finger-twiddle, Drakken turned and wove his klutzy way among the crowd of construction workers. Kim tracked the bright-yellow hard hat until it bobbed out of sight. She recognized the bird-skitter of his walk and his bad-back posture, but it was as if she were watching a stranger walk away.

What Kim _wanted_ to do was run up and throw her arms around her father and tell him, in no uncertain terms, that he had NAILED that. But Dad was visibly trying to gather his composure back, staring at the house-bones with a look that could have bolted them down all by itself. It wasn't the sort of thing you burst in on.

A pair of lanky arms came around Kim's waist from behind, and an almost-as-smooth-as-a-little-boy's chin descended three or four inches to rest on top of her head. Kim turned around into Ron's familiar, waiting chest.

"How ya holdin' up, KP?" Ron couldn't have whispered to save his life - Kim knew from life-or-death experience - but his voice was several notches gentler than his usual mega-blurt. "It getting any easier?"

Kim scanned the trees with their broken-off branches, took in the still-pockmarked driveway, and felt her a lump wilt in her throat. It was a new visitor, and she had to take a sec to clear it away before she answered.

"A little bit," Kim said. "But. . . I don't know. Even though we come down to the site every day, every time we turn that corner, I'm still half-expecting the house to be there. Because how can it _not_ be?"

To Ron's everlasting credit, he didn't compare it to his loss of Bueno Nacho. He just nodded, with goofy Ron-wisdom that always boxed up the stress and put it in cold storage. "You're still hoping it was just a bad dream?" he said.

"Exactly," Kim said. "A nightmare of I-turn-into-a-Synthodrone-and-melt-after-you-kiss-me proportions."

Ron's freckles flinched. "Boy, am I glad that didn't happen." He paused. "Well, the second part. I'm glad the _second_ part didn't happen. I'm all for the first part being real, 'cause if it wasn't, I couldn't do this."

He leaned in close and tapped a kiss on her nose, and then he pulled back and giggled. "Well, I guess I _could_ , but it'd be majorly awk-weird."

"Majorly," Kim echoed. She rested a hand on his wonderful slopey shoulder.

Of COURSE the Tweebs took that as their cue to come barging in to join them, Wade's shorter stride trailing them as he fiddled with the watch that was still projecting his hologram.

"Mole rat armor is a success!" Tim cried. He held out his palm, where Rufus was sporting a silver suit that sleeked in the afternoon sun. It looked like aluminum foil to Kim, but knowing her brothers, it was probably carbonized steel or whatever they were into this week.

"Ta-da!" Rufus struck a supermodel's pose.

Kim couldn't resist giving him a _tiny_ round of applause, even as she said, "Time well spent, guys."

Wade elbowed his way in between the Tweebs. They'd started their springing-up-and-stretching-out process last summer, and even though Wade was still waiting on his, he seemed so much older than they did, especially when he said, "Well, it wasn't _all_ fun and games. I've been talking with Global Justice about recovering the debris of the Lorwardian weapons for further study. It could come in handy big-time if they ever launch a second wave of attacks."

"Aww, come on, you serious? Why would they come back?" Jim moaned, probably to hide the fact that he'd gone a shade paler - he and Tim both.

"Yeah, Ron _toasted_ 'em!" Tim said.

Ron ducked his head, with what Kim figured was more pain than modesty.

"I hope not, either," Wade said. "But Warhok and Warmonga were PBDs on their planet - "

Pretty Big Deals. Kim would know a Monique-cronym anywhere.

"- so it wouldn't be a big surprise if they had family, or at least followers, who wanted revenge, or at least answers. The good news is that we have their technology right at our fingertips right now." Wade had mastered the serious face when he was super-little, but Kim could still tell how hyped he was.

"The better news is, they'd be nothing after Warhok and Warmonga," Ron said. Kim glanced at him sharply. His hands were juggling nothing, right there in the air. "Warhok and Warmonga were the boss fight. Anyone else from Lorwardia would just be, like, a tiny side-enemy character."

Kim rolled her eyes and felt a smile playing at the edges of her mouth. "Um, what? I don't speak video game."

"Then you, KP, have been missing out." Ron lowered his forehead at her. "Whaddya say we fix that? Xbox - tonight - my place?"

"You're on," Kim said.

They worked until sundown, until Kim was sure even her cheerleading-strong legs would conk out if she climbed even one more stepladder rung. Ron and Rufus had already collapsed onto the grass, panting and drizzling cold bottled water over their heads.

Mr. Barkin grabbed the bullhorn, kind of redundantly as far as Kim was concerned, and called, "Listen up, people!"

It was weird how she was going to miss that.

"Our service has ended for today," Barkin said. "But I expect to see all of you back here promptly at 8 AM. That means you, Stoppable!"

"Why me?" Ron muttered from the ground. "What did I even do?"

"We're far from done, troops." For half a second, the squared-off bristles of Barkin's buzz cut seemed to soften. "But we made some excellent progress today."

Kim made two quick searches of the yard. One was for Dad. He and Mom were resting under the shade of a tree that still had enough branches to fan out over them, holding hands as Dad pointed out the few faint blips in the sky that were planets coming into view. His jaw didn't have that look like it could crack walnuts anymore.

The other was for Drakken. Kim spotted him in the circle the construction workers had formed around Wade, round-eyed at the kid's hologram schematics. He was sweating like he'd been lifting barbells, which Kim was inclined to believe Drakken had NEVER done in his entire life. Up on his tiptoes to get a better view, he could almost be mistaken for innocent.

"Yeah," Kim whispered as she slid a comforting arm around Ron. "Yeah, I think we did."


	36. A Good Knock on the Head

**~Hello again, everyone! I was hoping to get this chapter up in time for Memorial Day weekend, and it looks like I just made it. I hope you all enjoy - I personally think this is some of the best writing I've ever done for Shego, but make up your own mind. ;)**

 **Thanks to all who reviewed.**

 **Timeline: Directly after _Clean Slate_.**

Gettin' the heck out of Dodge used to be a heck of a lot easier.

Actually, Shego's helicopter was making great time. She'd already cleared the hilltops and had the nose pointed in the direction of her weekend apartment when a whisper inside her head had demanded to know what she was doing. Nah, not even _demanded_. This was a soft thought that weakened in her chest, and it bugged the snot out of Shego.

What was she _doing_? What she'd always done: looking out for Number One.

 _Which last left you stranded on a ship with a crew of undead who all make Dr. D. look like Boss of the Year,_ said the other part of her.

Shego sighed from her kneecaps and wondered if she'd always been this much of a pain.

Her fists gripped on the steering gears, she fixated on the gray-blue-black sky surrounding her. Drakken was somewhere down below it, probably pitching the fit to end all fits. The farther along his plans got the chance to go, the closer he came to full-blown psychosis when they unraveled.

 _You know you have to go get him, don't you?_

 _Um, no. I know nothing of the sort._

Sure, she'd busted him out of jail after the whole disaster with Lucre. Midas hadn't been on call, and terminal boredom had been threatening.

 _You're contractually obligated to. . ._

 _Does it look like I give a rip?_

 _So you're just going to leave him there to be blown to bits? And give up the only job you've ever been able to hold down?_

Shego shifted her jaw from side to side. _How about NOT? I like my paycheck._

Then she'd better go and get him before some _other_ alien swooped down to save his worthless butt and transfer his loyalties. _'Cause who wants a repeat of that, am I right?_

Shego glanced at the notecard Drakken had given her earlier in the week - because that was his current solution to everything - which she'd finally found something adequately biting to jot down on. There was no way she was gonna pass up the opportunity to use a slam like that.

The thoughts hardened back into steel again, and Shego slipped the notecard into her leg pouch with genuine gratitude. She took a moment to make absolutely _sure_ she wasn't playing host to any even-remotely-goopy feeling, and _then_ she turned the helicopter around and headed back the way she'd come.

Okay, so Dr. D. had always been a little nuisance, but lately he'd fallen into a funk the likes of which Shego had never seen in the three-and-a-half years she'd been on his payroll. Ever since Kimmy had plucked him out of the ocean, he'd given new meaning to the word "sullen," sulking around the lair worse than Hego used to when the Go City Groundhogs were inevitably eliminated from the football playoffs. Sometimes now Shego would go for hours without hearing a peep from him. Before, even when Drakken was too preoccupied to talk - which hadn't happened NEARLY often enough - he was still humming or grunting or muttering.

And the notecard thing was _the_ last straw. Wasn't that a warning sign of Alzheimer's or something? Yeesh, the Princess had gotten her memory wiped last week, and she was _still_ in better mental shape than Drakken.

Shego hated him for making her worry.

The railroad came back into dim view through the helicopter's tinted windshield, and Shego swooped it down for a closer look. There was no train anywhere in sight - no evidence that a massive explosion had taken place, either. No sign of Kimmy or Loser Boyfriend.

Just a blue speck plopped in the center of the tracks.

 _You're_ so _predictable, Doc._

Shego coasted the helicopter to a landing and hopped out. From sixty feet away, she could see Drakken with his tiny legs in a morose sprawl, one even-tinier hand pressed to his forehead.

This was almost unfair, but Shego still sauntered onto the tracks, fixing up her best mixture of irony and innocence. She squatted down beside Drakken, pulled the card from her pouch, and said, "You know, _I_ had a card for this: _Dr. D. loses_."

Drakken dropped his palm and glared at her through heavy lids. That was when Shego noticed how funky he looked. Not that he ever would've made the cover of _GQ_ , but. . .

Dr. D's hair sprang in all directions like scruffy clumps of windblown grass. And something was up with his pupils - they weren't really too big or too small, but with more of a blurry, unfocused look than was normal even for Drakken. Musta been some new tactic for keeping the tears in. Between the tumble off the train and the anger that all but rose off him, of course tears wouldn't be far behind.

"Curse Kim Possible," Drakken finally said. The sentence was a guttural snarl bigger than the neck it came out of. Yeah, he was fine.

"She escape?" Shego asked.

Drakken nodded, and Shego took a moment to kick herself for not making sure she'd left Kimmy with some third-degree burns, if not worse. Shego had never actually knocked off anyone with her plasma before - she was more than willing to, but only if she could make a quick, clean kill. Drakken had never really gotten over the end of _Raiders of the Lost Ark_.

"And stole your little brainwash formula?" Shego said.

Another nod.

"And lemme guess. She managed to save the train, too?"

Drakken nodded again, rolling out a trademark pout. Dangit. Shego had been hoping it'd at least be a hollow victory for the Princess.

"Well." She dusted her hands together. "Another day, another best-take-over-the-world-plot-ever failure. Let's call it a night, huh?"

Shego nudged Drakken. He didn't so much as twitch.

"Uh, Doc -" Shego dragged her voice down to certified-teacher mode - "this is the part where we go home and think about what we can do differently next time."

The silence was like a brick.

Seriously? He was pulling this NOW? In the middle of a railroad track?

Shego reached down and gave one of Drakken's ape-arms a yank. That must've ignited whatever pride he could possibly still have left, because he struggled the rest of the way up himself and tore himself away from her the second he was vertical again.

Just in time to stumble over nothing and fall.

That didn't worry her too badly, because he was Drakken and he had a tendency to fall over at random. He also a tendency to scramble back to his feet before he'd even fully landed so he could flick imaginary dust particles from him and reassure his audience that he'd _meant_ to do that. This time, he just sat there like some busted-backed chair at the dump, his hands planted on their opposite arms.

Shego was about to lash her tongue at him when she noticed that his arms weren't in a stubborn fold. They were rubbing up and down his sleeves with the force of a car-wash brush. Drakken's body shook as if it were reliving the I-want-to-pull-the-continents-together plan that had spoiled itself.

Of course. It was way below freezing, with snow spitting from the sky and a wind chill in the negative zone. She at least had thermal control in her jumpsuit. Drakken's lab coat had squat - unless you counted the shoulder pads that he thought made him look big and tough.

Right now he seemed anything but.

"Get up. Please," Shego said, her jaw in a vicious snap. "The lair will be warmer - I promise."

"She- _go_." Drakken gripped the widow's-peak sides of his temples. "My head. It - I hurt." The panic on Drakken's face was drenching him in sweat. With those defined cheekbones popping, he looked ten pounds lighter than he had just this morning.

"Oh, for the love of - " Shego wrenched Drakken upright again and maneuvered Drakken's long, lanky body into the helicopter's passenger seat before swinging herself decisively in next to him. She snapped the driver's seatbelt on and frosted a _you-got-a-problem-with-this?_ look over at Drakken.

Drakken didn't protest any. He was already slouched in the seat, and his can't-focus eyes drifted off beyond the horizon pretty much into some other dimension. Probably one of those that was only accessible to the super-nerds.

He was with-it enough to heave a martyr's breath, though, and Shego welcomed the chance to insert an eye-roll. "So tell me, Peter Pufferpuff - was this the second or third time we've botched a Great Train Robbery?" she said.

Drakken's response? He stuck his fingers up about as close to his faraway gaze as they could get, unfolded them one by one, and began to count on them. "It was. . . let's see. . . . there was that one time, and then there was - which makes - wait - what was the question again?"

 _The question was, why do I even BOTHER?_

Every time the helicopter banked a turn, Drakken gave one of those _oh-cripes-I've-been-shot_ flinches. There wasn't a peep out of him, either. The quiet, refreshing as it SHOULD have been, brought a sour taste to the back of her mouth.

"C'mon. Let's go home and you can. . ." Shego swallowed her pride and the thick layer of disgust rising like phlegm in her throat. ". . .think up a new plan?"

That was the point where the Dr. D she knew would've unfolded out of his Quasimodo posture and come up straight, eyes all agleam. Nothin'. That meant the pep-talk ball was still in her court, and since when had _she_ ever been the peppy one?

"Dr. D," Shego said, and this time she made sure to put plenty of weight behind it.

Drakken seized his temples as if she'd just threatened him with a lobotomy. His "Be quiet! Have I mentioned my head hurts?" was a mew of orphaned-kitten proportions.

"Have I mentioned you're a wimp?" Shego shook her head and then plowed on before Drakken's face could even register the insult. "No - seriously - Doc. I know you're bound to be in some pain. You fell off the train -"

"No, I hit the tunnel."

Shego jerked the helicopter around so sharply her own hair slapped her in the face. "You did WHAT?"

"Sto-op!" The hands descended from Drakken's temples to _try_ and cover his honkin'-huge ears, and he squinted at her. "Why are you staring like that?"

Somehow Shego got her jaw to release. "Because I never believed in miracles before," she said.

The helicopter did another 180 and took off even faster.

"Shego, you're doing it wrong," Drakken said, slurring worse than the goofy drunk on every old-fashioned sitcom. "Home is that-a-way." He waved a finger in the more-or-less direction they'd been headed.

"Yeah, change of plans," Shego said. "We're going to the hospital."

Drakken's skin went pasty white, throwing the scar into black relief. He mangled the words, "Hospital? Why?"

"Because I'm ninety percent sure you have a concussion. How are you not _dead_?" Shego said. A laugh was in danger of bursting out of her. "Is your head really that hard?"

"Shut u-up, She- _go_!" Drakken's whine broke like a pathetic preteen's.

Shego decided to let that one go since he _probably_ had a concussion. And because it was so darn funny.

He guided his fingers back through his hair with a bunch-load more concentration than even Drakken should need. "You think I have a concussion? Really?"

"Yes, really," Shego said. She tilted her head to get a better look at him under the melted snow running down from his shaggy eyebrow. It was hard to take stock of the pupils with those irises that blended right in, but there was no missing the fog in them. "If you looked at your eyes. . ."

Drakken cycled through a couple of too-slow blinks. "In a mirror?"

"Uh, ye-ah. Where else?"

"I don't like mirrors," Drakken said.

"Why not?" Shego said.

Drakken thrust out his lower lip, which protruded just fine by itself, especially with the swelling split at the corners that Shego was just now noticing. "Because I'm ugly."

There would have been a line about his eyesight not going if Shego hadn't been actually, maddeningly concerned.

She clamped down tighter on the steering gears and concentrated on turning her shoulders to iron rods. She'd been to the ER no less than five or six times with Drakken over the years, so this was nothing new. She was contractually obligated to make sure this didn't do any permanent damage to Dr. D's scatty little brain. And as comparatively placid as he was being, he might not be the patient from Hades tonight.

Speaking of placid - it was suspicious. He'd finally shut up, and Shego couldn't even appreciate it.

She jerked around just in time to see Drakken's chin drowsing toward his chest. Shego shot one hand out and caught a fistful of Drakken's sleeve. Flying one-handed was _way_ less of a risk - especially for her - than letting him nod off.

"Leave me alone," Drakken croaked. "I want to sleep."

That doubled the speed of Shego's pulse and honed her voice down to a knife. "Yeah, and that's how we know something's wrong. Since when do _you_ EVER want to sleep?"

"Since now." Drakken took a weak stab at wrenching out of Shego's grasp, which only enabled her to shake loose and then come back with an even-firmer grip.

"Look, buster," she said, "your brain just bopped off the walls of your skull. We have to go to the hospital to make sure it doesn't cause brain damage. And if you pick _now_ to catch up on your beauty sleep, I guarantee that you can kiss that whole 'Dr. Drakken achieves global conquest' thing good-bye." Shego stopped only because she was going shrill, and she couldn't afford that.

At her use of his self-awarded villain title, a doped-up smile appeared on Drakken's lips.

"Okay?" Shego said. She left one hand clenched on Drakken's forearm. Her fingertips could practically touch, which didn't sit well on her nerves either.

Drakken's smile flip-flopped into a frown, every bit as big and oafish. "O-kayyyyy."

"That's the spirit!" Shego said. "And - all right - just think about all the cool tech the emergency ward'll have, y'know? MRI's - CAT scans - "

"Space-age thermometers," Drakken said, still sounding for all the world like someone had spiked his chocolate milk that morning. He tried to drag his gaze over to her, flinched, and put it back. "Will you stay with me?"

 _Fair question._

Shego's nails squeezed the gears until she half-expected them to start crying for mercy. "Yeah, like I'm really gonna leave you alone in the hospital with a concussion. People have gone psycho from those things."

That visibly perked Drakken up. "I might fly into a panicked rage, and you would be the only one I'd recognize!"

"And then I'd get to save everyone," Shego said. The dryness came without any coaxing.

Drakken began to grin stupidly at the flurries falling past the windows. "Did you like saving people, Shego?" he said. "When you were a superhero?"

"If you didn't have a concussion, I'd give you one," Shego muttered.

* * *

The helicopter's on-board GPS indicated the nearest hospital was 50 miles away. That could've been an issue, but Shego remembered Drakken assuring her in one of his many tech-envy rants that HenchCo's helicopters could "make time." If they did, Shego vowed she'd never give him a hard time about THAT particular outdated phrase again.

It could, and it did. Shego spent most of that "time" either hunched over the steering gears, mentally cursing Drakken, or snapping her fingers in front of his slackening face so that he jerked upright again with some antenna-on-the-fritz noises.

The nearest hospital turned out to be an aging building whose white stucco walls thumbed their noses at the glass-fronted trend. Shego hadn't set more than a toe into the ER waiting room when the scent of phony pine needles bullied its way into her nose. But at least it wasn't blood or puke. Either of those might've set Dr. D. off.

Shego encircled Drakken's wrist with her fingers again and abbreviated her usual long strides to Drakken-friendly ones as she hauled him toward the front desk, where she glared holes into the receptionist's frizzy-haired head until the woman looked up - with a _you'll-have-to-wait_ look that churned up a wealth of dry-eyed fury.

"No, you don't understand, pumpkin," Shego said before the receptionist could say a word. "Put Dr. Drakken at the top of your list. We've got a concussion here."

"Sustained by what?" the receptionist asked. With all the interest of a cop reduced to parking-violation duty.

"Collision with a train tunnel," Shego said.

"Face-first," Drakken added behind her. There were times when she really liked the guy.

 _That_ brought the receptionist's head up, and her frizz puffed out 'til she could pass for Einstein. "I'll let you know as soon as a room opens up." The professionalism clamped to her words didn't match the open-mouthed gawk she was sending Drakken's direction.

"I can breathe!" Drakken thundered, sounding close to his old obnoxious self. "It's a skin condition!"

And then there were those _other_ times.

Drakken took a sprawled-back seat in an uncomfortable chair while Shego stood in front of him, muscles tingling. His gaze swept over the ceiling as if there were gonna be a quiz on it later.

"It's better to close your eyes, Doc," Shego said. There'd been some first-aid classes in her child-development-degree past.

Drakken shut 'em. In the harsh hospital florescents, the hollows underneath seemed even deeper than Shego remembered. Yeesh. Prison really _had_ done a number on him.

"Promise you'll stay with me the _whole_ time?" Drakken said. "I'm scared."

The soles of Shego's feet went numb. The Dr. D she knew would have sooner passed a kidney stone than admit he was scared. She got an "I already promised" out before being succumbing to a case of lockjaw.

A room opened up twenty-five endless minutes later. Shego eased Drakken down the long hallway and into a jumbo room that had obviously just been power-blasted with antiseptic. The nurse got Drakken propped up, tucked in, and practically tied down in a bed with an assurance that a "Dr. Kennedy" would be with them shortly.

Drakken wriggled his skinny little fanny - about the only part of him that couldn't be pinned down - frantically across the sheets. Before the nurse left, she gave him the type of glance usually reserved for service dogs you weren't allowed to pet. Shego would _never_ figure out what some gals saw in that man.

Especially now. Though there was absolutely no gray running through his hair - how DID the man do that at forty-two? - Drakken suddenly looked old, all sunken into the sheets like a wizened geezer. His lips were set as if he were prepared to keep being cantankerous the whole dang night. Lips that would never have spit the word "wench" of their own free will.

A doctor who must've been Kennedy ducked to keep his scalp from hitting the doorway and then filled the room, dwarfing Drakken even further. "Hello," he said. There was no strain in the arm he extended toward Drakken. "Terribly sorry for your wait."

"Why can't you leave me alone? I just want to sleep." This from a brittle-voiced Drakken.

Kennedy didn't even peek at the clipboard in his hand. He nudged a wheeled stool over with the back of his hand and dropped onto it like a gymnast. "Because you, my friend, have suffered a concussion, and it's very important that you stay awake for right now."

Some of the life seemed to come back to Drakken's scraggly ponytail. "Are you here to fix my head?" he said.

 _Oh, I don't know if_ any _one could do that, Dr. D._

Dr. Kennedy beamed. Shego half-expected him to pull a lollipop from the pocket of his coat. "That's the goal, yes. I'm going to need to ask you a few questions, okay?"

He scooted the stool over and angled it to get a better look at Drakken's eyes. Kind of a challenge when they hadn't budged from Shego's the whole time. She knew it wasn't just the glaze-thick-as-frosting over them that kept away any spark of accusation.

The poor slob actually _trusted_ her.

Shego felt the faintest wave of something in her chest, and she wasn't any more at home handling that than she'd be with anything in Drakken's beloved chemistry set. Becoming more dangerous, having an actual shot at world domination - those were things the Doc would've sold his soul for in a heartbeat. What, just because she didn't stop right there and perform an exorcism, she was on par with Benedict Arnold? She couldn't even be sued for breach of contract, because what the heck kind of employment contract had a demon-possession clause?

Kennedy tilted his head in what looked a lot like bewilderment to Shego. Drakken tended to do THAT to people, too. "First of all, how in the world did you manage to hit a train tunnel face-first?" he said.

"I was on top of the train," Drakken said. "Running on it. From my arch-nemesis, Kim Possible. Oooh, that Kim Possible! She thinks she's all - "

"Let's worry about Kim later," Dr. Kennedy interrupted. His gentleness was nothing short of amazing as he tapped his pen against the clipboard. "Can you tell me what your name is?"

"Didn't they _tell_ you?" Drakken said. The booming voice trailed out in threads.

"Yes, but I want to hear it from you," Kennedy said.

"Dr. Drakken."

Kennedy looked to Shego, and she nodded her confirmation.

"All right, Dr. Drakken, where do you live?" Kennedy asked.

"On an island in the Caribbean."

Shego nodded again.

"What year is it?" Kennedy said.

Drakken's forehead furrowed into pastel-blue strips. "I think. . . two thousand. . . uh. . . seven?"

He brought the twig-fingers up to count on again. Kennedy pushed them softly back down and fanned his own. "How many fingers am I holding up?"

"Three."

"Good, good." Kennedy scribbled on the clipboard. "Now, I'm going to need to ask you a few more questions - about the accident, all right?"

Drakken didn't answer. His eyes were already at half-mast again, and Shego gave him a full-strength pinch. It was the first time she'd found herself wanting to load Dr. D. up on caffeine.

"Okay," Drakken mumbled.

The stool squeaked as Kennedy readjusted his posture to something even more solemn. "Did you lose consciousness on impact?"

Drakken's mouth smacked. Shego's own curled back in disgust when she noticed the dried drool flaking at the corners of his. "I don't remember. Everything was black."

"I'll go ahead and take that as a yes." Kennedy's voice was dry. Shego was ready to nominate him for a Nobel Prize.

"He was awake by the time I found him," Shego stuck in.

Kennedy won some more cool points by not demanding to know why in the world she wasn't with him when he'd bashed into the tunnel. "Can you explain your relationship to the patient?" he said.

 _Sure. And why don't I go ahead and describe microgravity while I'm at it?_

"Employee," Shego said, cranking her jaw.

Dr. Kennedy turned back toward the bed. "And, right now, are you dizzy or nauseous?" He lifted his palm toward Drakken. "And just say yes or no. We need that head to stay as still as it can."

"Yes," Drakken said, and Shego believed him. The syllables were hunkered together the way they always did when he was about to blow chow. It was a sound she'd learned to dread.

"Did you vomit?"

Drakken squinted. "I don't _think_ so," he said.

"No sign of it when I found him," Shego said, limiting the shudder to her insides. She was way more familiar with Drakken's barf than she'd EVER wanted to be.

"That's good. That's good." The pen attacked the page again. "Is your vision blurred?"

"Not especially."

"How's your balance?"

"Not. . . that. . . great." Drakken's fingers flinched on the sheet. There was no sign of the Nightmare Patient.

"Passed out on the impact. Has he been unconscious since?" Dr. Kennedy directed that question to Shego.

She shook her head.

Back to Drakken. "But you _are_ fatigued?" he said.

"Yes, sir," Drakken mumbled into his lap. "That's normal, though, isn't it? I don't sleep good. Well. Nicely."

Shego watched the embarrassment squirm across the Doc's face. Another thing he'd never admit, even though those pink splotches were about as easy to miss as those CPR and Heimlich posters screaming from the walls.

"Well, I'm sure that doesn't help," Kennedy said. "But we need to hold off on letting you sleep until we determine how severe this concussion is. You appear to be fairly alert, which is good, but a loss of consciousness means you've given your brain a doozy of a whack. We're going to need to do a few tests on your reflexes, and then I'd like to do an MRI to rule out any internal bleeding or swelling."

Shego waited for a squawk that never came. Drakken rolled his pupils up so he could look directly at her then. They were milky and confused, and they gazed at her as if she HADN'T just sat back and watched while his body was repurposed for _Demon Fury Part XV_. Since, of course, he didn't remember.

 _If only we could all be so lucky._

In light of that, Drakken's third "You'll stay, right?" raked across Shego's skin. Her fists ached to be driven into someone's gut.

Closest she could come was turning to Kennedy and saying, "You got a bathroom around here where I can freshen up?"

Kennedy cracked the door open and pointed down the gray-carpeted hall. _That_ was when the Nightmare Patient returned, and Drakken set up a holler as if they were operating on him without anesthesia. "She _go_ , you _said_!"

Shego's patience had flat run out by now. She would have popped him one if turning him into a total vegetable hadn't been a legit concern. She closed her eyes and forced herself to picture the Drakken of Diablo Night, the Drakken who led her around the mall waiting for Kimmy to embarrass herself to death, the Drakken who was willing to plant a bomb on a world leader's T-zone to win their compliance.

Once she had a semi-decent picture of it in her mind, Shego told it, "I'll be back in a few." She patted Kennedy's shoulder. "Don't start the MRI without me, 'kay?"

The only makeup-related thing Shego had bothered to store in her leg pouch this evening was an almost-empty container of moisturizer, which she dabbed halfheartedly onto her cheeks beneath the bathroom's less-than-flattering light. Everything else she made a point to touch only with her elbows. The tasteful odor of bleach didn't cover the fact that people had brought the _plague_ in here.

With a shake-back of her hair, Shego peered in the mirror again. There was a pretty disturbing tinge to her face. Concern.

She plucked it off like a piece of lint.

* * *

Dr. Kennedy was testing Drakken's "coordination and reflexes" once Shego made it back to the room. She could practically feel the barb puncturing her throat as she swallowed it.

Drakken _did_ manage to walk in a semi-straight line across the floor, although Shego saw him practically gnawing his lower lip to shreds in concentration. And his legs popped up right on cue whenever they were tapped with that metal hammer thing - though Drakken yelped at each tap as if someone were beating him with a pipe.

Pain seared through Shego's clenched jaw. _I know you have a concussion, Doc. But - seriously - why can't you ever just -_

Drakken chose that moment to gaze mournfully up at her.

Why did the little wimp have to have such big eyes? Shego had the urge to kick the bed, but she didn't want to rattle whatever was left of his brains.

"Good, good. This bodes well." Kennedy made some more marks on his chart and then punched the business end of his pen against it several times. "He seems a tad foggy - "

This time, Shego couldn't HELP but add, "He's basically always like that."

" - but nothing that would give us immediate cause for alarm," Kennedy finished pretty darn graciously. So darn graciously that Shego had a bizarre flicker of jealousy. He clapped his hands and turned to Drakken. "So, Dr. Drakken, are you ready for your MRI?"

 _Why'd ya have to phrase that as a question?_

Drakken sighed down at the legs he'd swung over the side of the bed - the ones that dangled several limp inches above the floor. "I suppose," he said.

Kennedy turned an if-I-weren't-so-professional-I'd-be-grinning face to Shego. "Will you accompany us?"

Shego felt a groan oozing down from her temples. Everything in her screamed _No way!_ Yeah, even when she looked at Drakken, who was clutching the sheets so tightly the knuckles in his gloves were about to be torn through. But it seemed like her only alternative was the waiting room. Enough time in _that_ dull place and she'd end up needing to be admitted herself.

"Whatever," Shego said, tapping her way toward the bed.

Drakken's gaze stayed locked on Shego's. He had this really annoying habit of being completely helpless half the time, but every now and then, he'd genuinely mess himself up too bad to undo it, and he'd turn into this little orphaned cub or something. Actually could make you wanna take care of him. Not all the way - just throw him a bone.

She thought of Blackbrown Eyepatch's leer, as if she were just one more treasure chest that he couldn't wait to plunder if all went well. You could fill a five-hundred-page reference book with Drakken's faults, but at least it wouldn't even OCCUR to him to look at her that way.

The instant Dr. Kennedy strapped one of Drakken's wrists to the bed, his Adam's apple did a furious yo-yo imitation. Shego put a hand on Drakken's arm, just so he wouldn't think about bolting. Luckily, Dr. Kennedy squatted down across from her, and his bedside manner was more comforting than Shego's could ever _hope_ to be as he assured Drakken that the MRI was perfectly safe, thoroughly painless, and always supervised just in case.

Shego felt the thin muscles soften and give as one hand squeezed hers. The grip was almost as cold as she remembered the pirate ghost's, but weaker and kinder.

That was good enough for her. She was more than glad to shoot to her feet and notch her arms over her chest and trail Kennedy to the MRI room, where they were greeted by a technician who couldn't have been all the way through college yet.

He gave her the kind of concerned glance a pasty-green girl got used to. It was still preferable to being hit on. "Miss, are you sure _you're_ all right?" he asked. "You're looking a little -"

"Absolutely fine. I guess you could say I've got a skin condition myself," Shego said, rummaging for the silky-without-being-slinky voice she'd spent years perfecting.

The tech kid did crack a grin. "Must be genetic."

Shego didn't even bother to correct him. Wasn't the first time that mistake had been made. And if nothing else, the dad-or-big-brother-in-the-room factor tended to shut down all but the most hopeless flirts.

They were probably leaning toward _dad_ about now, even though Drakken still had the type of face that a bartender would eye with suspicion. With his chin tilted like he was still trying to be He-Man and his cheeks so drained that the scar was like black graffiti spray-painted against white walls, he currently looked every bit of forty-two. It made her strangely angry.

Kennedy bent over Drakken and murmured some more words of encouragement. It seemed to work. His big-man face emptied with sheer exhaustion, and his eyes fluttered shut.

For the sake of her paycheck, they'd better open again.

Shego hung back as they slid Drakken into the MRI as if they were slipping a Pop-Tart into the toaster. The oversized camera started to whir and beep immediately, clicking a slow journey around Drakken's hard little head. At one point, the camera rotated to the back, and Shego was able to catch a glimpse of his mouth.

It was set in a dreamy smile.

He was smiling. He was getting scanned for brain hemorrhages and he was _smiling_?

 _Man, you talk about a serious case of the geeks._

Even after Drakken was popped back out of the machine and wheeled back to "his" room - he'd already taken to calling it that - he still wouldn't stop mumbling excitedly about buttons and switches and attachments that meant even less to Shego than a software license agreement. Good news was, the oldness was long gone from his face. It was sloppy and soft at the edges.

Bad news was, she was the one who had to LISTEN to him. For what seemed like hours before Dr. Kennedy stepped back into the room, holding a recent printout and wearing half a smile.

"Good news, Dr. Drakken." Kennedy took a crisp, clean seat on his stool and crossed one leg neatly over the other. "The MRI results indicate no internal bleeding and minimal swelling."

Shego's breathing evened out, and a snicker hitched a ride with it. _Because he's got the thickest skull the world's seen since the Jurassic Age?_

Drakken's eyes dimension-hopped back and lit up. "So. . . that means. . . it's not severely severe?"

"No, not 'severely severe'." Kennedy pressed his fingers together as professionally as he'd done everything else so far, but Shego recognized a person on the verge of laughter when she saw one. "Since you _did_ lose consciousness, however, we'd like to keep you overnight for observation."

 _Oh, good. I didn't need to sleep tonight anyway._

"Observation of what?" Drakken gave Kennedy a suspicious squint that Shego could've slapped off him if she'd been any closer.

"Post-concussion symptoms. Vomiting. Seizures."

Shego grunted to herself. Drakken's entire _life_ was pretty much one big seizure as far as she was concerned.

To her surprise, Drakken chirped, "Ooh! Sounds exciting!" He wiggled his fingers in the air and wormed closer to the doctor - and then let out a yawn they probably heard up in the operating room.

"You'll be permitted to sleep," Dr. Kennedy said, still visibly blinking back traces of amusement. "But we will be waking you up every few hours just to make sure you're still lucid."

A chorus went off in Shego's head, and it wasn't exactly singing _hallelujah_. "Good luck with THAT," she muttered.

The tech kid wheeled a cushioned chair into the room, and Shego accepted it with a rare, generous dose of sincere gratitude. Whatever it was that had brought her back for Drakken was warning her not to leave the room. These guys may have been pros, but they didn't have the Drakken-experience that she did. They didn't know about his natural talent for generating disaster in the three seconds your back was turned. Hand stuck down the bathtub drain. Entire lab set on fire.

 _And, oh yeah, he's also been known to inhale ghosts._

* * *

There wasn't any peace in the hospital that night, and Shego wouldn't have been comfortable if there were.

Sneakers squeaked across linoleum, doctors were paged on loudspeakers leftover from the twentieth century, and dainty little wheezes puffed from Drakken. Without his usual buzzsaw-snores, he almost didn't resemble his pain-in-the-neck self at all.

Until his first wake-up.

Drakken came awake swinging at the air with his fists and yelping, "We strike Middleton - now!"

"He's dreaming," Shego said - instead of _he's reliving the night he came closest to world domination_. Drakken gaped at her in the bulgy-eyed horror he tended to pull out when she didn't tell the whole truth and he'd forgotten where he'd parked his supervillain brain for the day.

Well, news flash. It wasn't relevant, and the last thing they needed now was a fast ticket to the psyche ward.

The wake-up routine consisted of the same three questions - "What's your name?" "Where do you live?" "What year is it?" - each of which Drakken answered with a snap worthy of a drill sergeant.

"Dr. Drakken!"

"An island in the Caribbean!"

"2007!"

Shego waited for a second to make sure they weren't ACTUALLY gonna stick a gold star on the chart at the foot of his bed.

The nurse smiled as if Drakken had recited the Preamble from memory, patted his shoulder pad - which had slunk down to almost meet his elbow - and gave him permission to go back to sleep.

Drakken obeyed _that_ order to a T. His head audibly thumped back into the pillow and got right back to its drool production.

Shego actually managed to dose off for a bit herself in the sofa-chair - it wasn't the most UNcomfortable place she'd ever slept - until the lab kid breezed in for the second wake-up. He gave Drakken the same slow round of questions. Drakken's answers were the same, though this time they were thin growls, a two-octaves-lower version of the kind his oh-so-ferocious attack poodle gave the FedEx guy.

Lab Kid nodded and scribbled and had barely cleared the door before Drakken conked back out again.

He didn't look innocent the way everyone always said people looked in their sleep, Shego decided as she watched him. He didn't look like a deranged supervillain bent on enslaving the earth, but you didn't have to be _too_ perceptive to notice the economy-sized frown that constant stress had put there, the matching nervous twitches in his neck, and the sharp, shallow breaths that barely seemed able to hold it all together. It definitely wasn't a clean conscience she was observing.

But it _was_ a conscience.

Which was his whole problem right there. If he'd ditched that thing along with the glasses when he'd dropped out, his life would be going a whole lot smoother. It was infuriating to watch him hunched over his desk, marinating in his own wasted potential - especially these last several weeks when all he'd done was brood and scrawl junk on notecards.

Shego felt herself going as stiff and gritty as her nail file, and she made a conscious effort to unclench her fist.

Dr. Kennedy himself returned from a just-long-enough-to-give-him-bed-head break for the third wake-up. He at least didn't sound sickeningly upbeat, not when Drakken came awake in hysterics again, screeching about killer robots and Brainwashing Shampoo and electric eels. He _did_ wheel the stool to Drakken's side and soothe him until Drakken was calm enough for Kennedy to ask, "What's your name?"

"Drew Lipsky," Drakken slobbered in reply.

The light of concern that had waited dimly in Kennedy's eyes all night flickered on for the first time.

Shego actually felt sorry for him. She jumped in with, "No, no, it's okay. He goes by both." Drakken was too dopey to interject the whole radio-talk-show-host spiel - which was probably a good thing, considering his typical lie was about as obvious as a bad airbrush job.

Kennedy shot her a look of pure relief. "And where do you live, Mr. Lipsky?"

"On an island." Drakken flopped his arm vaguely against the sheets he was all but disappearing into. "In the Caribbean."

"And what year is it?"

"2007. _May_ 2007." Drakken was with-it enough to throw a gloat together, as if there were some kinda prize for giving the right answers.

Kennedy came up from his perch on the stool that was starting to look like a natural extension of his body to Shego and tucked his clipboard into his armpit. "Well, Mr. Lipsky, you've done very well. I have full confidence that we'll be able to release you come morning."

That couldn't happen fast enough.

By the fourth wake-up, dawn was starting to blush on the horizon and the inside of Shego's mouth tasted like one of Hego's workout jerseys. Dr. Kennedy squatted down again and asked Drakken his name.

Drakken stared at him, bleary-eyed. "Don't you _know_ by now?" he griped.

Shego would've laughed if she hadn't been propping up her eyelids with the backs of her knuckles. She was _so_ getting paid overtime for this.

* * *

Shego awoke the next morning to tacky imitation sunlight and a spine like a set of Tinker Toys. Man, if this was how Drakken's back felt twenty-four/seven, she _almost_ didn't blame him for being such a whiny baby about it.

Drakken himself, on the other hand, was sitting half-propped-up in bed, smiling faintly down at the Styrofoam breakfast tray in his lap. More faintly by the minute as he took in what he was being offered - a bowl of bran flakes wilting in fat-free milk and eggs-from-a-packet than even Mr. Human Garbage Disposal shunned. Drakken picked at them with a more cautious approach than Shego had seen him take toward bio-waste. How could the man function on such little sleep?

Shego held back another grunt. _Guess it depends on your definition of "function."_ She'd already noticed several notecards poking their pointless, stubborn little corners out of Drakken's pockets.

Jokes aside, though, you'd have never pegged him for an ER patient - at least not once you got past the blueness. The deathly pallor was gone from his face, and he looked hearty again. Well, as hearty as Dr. D ever looked these days.

Speaking of beauty disasters. . . she didn't even wanna _think_ about what state her hair was in. Shego took the chance to retrieve her compact from her leg pouch and crimp together a few flyaway black strands so that she WOULDN'T be mistaken for the Wicked Witch of the West from a distance.

A kid wailed from one of the other rooms, and Shego felt a rare pang. That suffering was too shrill to be relished and too pure to prick at the back of her neck. It turned her into someone she didn't even recognize.

Shego was glad when Dr. Kennedy swept into the room, his bleary eyes warm, and took a nimble seat on the ever-present stool. Drakken caught sight of him and instantly blurted, "My name is Dr. Drakken, I live on an island in the Caribbean, and it's the year 2007!"

"Good morning to you, too, Dr. Drakken," Kennedy said in an amateur monotone. "We're going to go ahead and release you, but first we want to make a few things clear. We want you to spend the next several days resting as much as possible."

Shego gave an inaudible snort. _No way is_ that _gonna happen._ She still remembered the incredulity in Drakken's voice when he'd confessed, "All right, so I fell asleep again" - as if he were saying, "Twice in one week! Can you believe it?"

Of course, Drakken had never been in a slump this serious before. Not that Shego had ever seen. She missed the Dr. D. who got a sinister glint in his eye when he detailed his plan for Kimmy's demise.

"Keep your eyes closed as much as you can. And you'll need to avoid activities that are too strenuous on your brain for a while." Dr. Kennedy opened a folder on the wrinkled lap of his coat. "No staring at a computer screen, no staring at your checkbook. No reading - have someone else read to you."

Shego machine-gunned a _don't-even-think-about-it_ look in Drakken's direction.

"Oh-kay," Drakken said - to both of them, Shego was pretty sure. She could tell without seeing that Drakken was pushing out something beyond the underbite pout and that his body was receding even farther into his own lab coat.

"Wonderful!" Kennedy clapped the folder closed and stood up. "We'll get you discharged, and you can walk right on out of here, all right?"

 _Right out of here, my foot._ The Wegos had been BORN faster than it took to get someone discharged from the hospital.

Drakken spent most of the time sighing like an automatic door because he wasn't allowed to fill out any of the paperwork, which Shego woulda been _glad_ to give him under any other circumstances. She hated feeling like the secretary about as much as she hated anything.

When Dr. Kennedy finally said they were free to go, Shego shoved the clipboard at him - without the full force of her superstrength - and practically broke into a run to get out to the helicopter whose invisibility cloak she'd clicked on last night. She expected Drakken to be right behind her on his little bird-legs. But when Shego turned around, Drakken had his hand resting on Dr. Kennedy's shoulder, giving him the businessman-handshake he'd learned from Perky Perkins.

"Thank you," Drakken said, panting between words, "so much for making certain nothing happened to me."

"It's what we're here for," Kennedy said. Shego could almost _feel_ him shelving the urge to ruffle Drakken's hair. Her jaw had practically clipped the front of her jumpsuit already.

 _Yikes. If this is what brain trauma does to him, why didn't I induce it a long time ago?_

 _Then again, I said that about possession, too._

* * *

Drakken seemed pretty convinced by Shego's argument that piloting a helicopter fell under "strenuous activity" and collapsed into the passenger seat, kicking his boots up almost onto the control panel before she glared them off. "Well," he said, eyes closing, "there were many ways that could have gone worse."

"Ya think?" Shego said as they lifted past the treetops and the hospital roof. "Starting with your death."

"Err, yes. I suppose." Drakken fidgeted, and one notecard squirmed out of his pocket and splashed onto the floor. "But I think we all know Dr. Drakken is made of sterner stuff than that, don't we?"

"No, we know your _head_ is made of concrete," Shego said. "But I guess we kinda always figured that anyway."

"Now, Shego, I'll have no more of your sassigassity!" Drakken's eyes flew open, and the veins in them looked for all the world like they were going to leap out and wrap around her throat.

Shego guffawed into her palm so she wouldn't spray the windshield. " _Sassigassity_? Is that even a word?"

"It is," Drakken said. The pouty chin tilted upward. "Dickens used it."

"You've read _Dickens_?"

"I've been to school, Shego!" Drakken careened out of baritone, skipped tenor completely, and skidded into soprano.

"Yeah, but did you study?"

"GGNNNGH SHE-GO!"

 _Yeah, this feels better._

Drakken had fallen into a slobbery sleep by the time they landed at the island he'd had to relay to the doctors every two hours. Shego shot him a sideways smirk. No doubt she coulda picked him up, especially since prison, and carried him right into the lair. Be a nice drive-by to that ego - except that he probably wouldn't have even stirred, and she'd have wasted her strength.

Shego stood up and took a few steps toward him, and her heel caught on that dang notecard, which tipped her backward. She thrust her arms behind her before she could fall, got a grip on the sides of the driver's seat, and propelled herself off it, snipping the notecard between two fingers as she flipped over it.

Staring up at her was the sentiment, _Thank Shego for getting me to hopsital. At a time when she's not beign insufferable._

Or, in Dr. D's as-messy-as-an-actual-doctor's handwriting, it might have been " _un_ sufferable." Shego wouldn't actually have been that surprised.

Shego felt her mouth twitch for the first time in about eighteen hours as she leaned over and tucked the notecard back into the baggy pocket over his lack-of-hips. Normally, she'd have given him a rough shake to wake him up, but that kind of went out the window with an MRI in the recent past.

Instead, Shego rested a hand on his sleeve and crammed all of her focus into forcing her glove-blades not to claw in. "Wake up, Dr. D," she said. "We're home."

 **~Drakken has some trouble spelling when he's stressed. Also, Shego calls Blackeye Brown "Blackbrown Eyepatch," because she just doesn't care. ;)**


	37. Invasion of Privacy (Loss of Innocence)

**~I'm finally back. Sorry, my summer has gotten really busy and I don't have quite as much time for writing as I would like. Hopefully the next chapter shouldn't take me so long.**

 **Timeline: Season Three, sometime soon after _Dimension Twist_. Part of the sequence of events that leads to a more hardened Drakken in _So the Drama_.**

 **T for cartoonish. . . uh, bareness.~**

There are few sensations better than waking up with the sun and discovering you did, in fact, remember to take your contacts out last night.

Dr. Drakken decides this as he yawns and stretches across his wide red sheets. So soon after awakening with a catfight in his head the morning after too much of what he now understands was not fruit punch, this is pure bliss. His eyeballs are moist and content, and his lids open painlessly, albeit with the standard amount of morning crust.

Ahhhh. Why doesn't he do this more often?

Oh, right. Because he's a supervillain bent on world domination, and such a task requires one keep long hours. Well, actually, Drakken's hours are still sixty minutes long, just as they are for everyone else. It's just that he uses more of them. . .

Drakken pushes through the murkiness of that darn English language and into the breathtaking potential of presidents and prime ministers kneeling before him, maybe by the end of the week. It's a stronger buzz than espresso (which Drakken tried one day, and he thinks he may have broken the sound barrier).

Vision still blurry, Drakken stumbles into the bathroom, where he rinses his contact case and pops the lenses back into his eyes. His surroundings clear, and Drakken sighs his gratitude for the high-definition sight of them all: the foreboding walls buttressed by their rectangular structures, the doorways wide enough to accommodate a hippo, the hairline cracks in the floor that indicate tanks full of sharks. Fierce ones, too, tiger sharks and bull sharks and great whites, none of those giant, wussy types - toothless and harmless and useless.

Speaking of teeth, Drakken's are itching to crunch into something. All right, so enamel can't truly itch. . . point being, he's hungry.

Drakken takes a quick peek at his lab to ensure his latest doom machine is still slumbering peacefully in the corner. It's so beautiful there that he would gladly stand and observe it all day if his belly didn't gurgle and weaken his calves.

 _Did I eat dinner last night?_

Can't remember. It was Sunday. No one to remind him.

So it is with great pleasure that Drakken pours himself a bowl of Cocoa Pebbles and breaks his own record for Speediest Spoon in the Northern Hemisphere. It leaves chocolate milk behind for him to slurp, and his eyes are still comfy, and he almost forgets the planet, because what more could anyone ask for?

It is the zenith of the day.

Not because he has a case of the Mondays. First of all, that phrase makes no sense, because Monday has no bacterial, viral, or fungal properties. It is merely a manmade concept of every seventh day; it is not naturally evil. Not like Dr. Drakken.

Secondly, Drakken loves Monday mornings for the exact reason most people can't stand them - it is the beginning of the work week, and Shego returns. Sometimes he's able to pal around (as the teens today say) with his henchmen on the weekends, if they don't have a baseball game or something else equally mundane to attend, but it's nice to have another person with a triple-digit IQ to keep him company. The sarcasm that vexes him so is even more deflating in its absence.

When the front door clicks open, Drakken rushes to greet his sidekick, pausing only long enough to lick some cocoa m - _no, chocolate milk_ , he corrects himself - from his chin. If he bears any resemblance to his simpering ninny of an alter ego created by the Attitudinator, Shego might very possibly turn on her heel and leave. And Drakken, though he'd try his hardest to, wouldn't be able to blame her.

The two of them convene in Drakken's laboratory. Shego begins with, "Well, Dr. D, how's the damage so far?"

"That's very pessimistic of you, Shego," Drakken reports as Shego takes a backward seat in a chair, her feet scuffing on either side of the back legs rather than the front ones, her chin resting on its head-ridge.

"All right, then, Mr. Sunshine." Shego sniffs. "What's the plan today?"

"I have a plan. And it's a good plan." It's a moment before Drakken can take a mental inventory and discover himself to be telling the truth. "I continue to seek my revenge on Professor Dementor!"

"Question." Shego lifts her hand like she's a responsible student, when anyone can testify that she is anything but. "Isn't that just the _teensiest_ bit petty?"

"Revenge for getting me drunk at the Villain House Party!" Drakken roars.

Shego's eyes startle from their usual slant. "Oh. Well - petty away, then," she says with a wave of her wrist. "That was one of the worst nights of my life."

Drakken knows better than to ask what the others were.

He begins to pace the floor. "Since the plot to spirit away the Pan-Dimensional Vortex Inducer failed - "

"Ya think?" Shego says.

Despite its structure, it is not a yes-or-no question. It's not meant to be answered at all, except Drakken must respond with, "Zip it _up_ , Shego!" - which would sound quite intimidating if his voice didn't split around it as if it were still adolescent and unripe. He can't help it, though, not when the memories dig in of his having been cheerfully accosted by a puppet's posterior.

"I have concocted a new plan!" Drakken says, taking thirteen seconds to gather back his thunder. "Behold -" he whips his gaze toward the squatty framework of his latest invention and is thrilled to see Shego's follow - "the DNA Discluder! As soon as it is programmed with the victim's fingerprints - "

"Fingerprints aren't DNA," Shego butts in, as though he doesn't know that. As though he's not a criminal genius. As though the only lesson he learned from his brief dalliance with DNAmy was not to propose to someone after less than forty-eight hours.

"It had to _alliterate_!" Drakken hisses back. "Now, once it has been programmed with the victim's fingerprints and activated by _moi_ -" it sounds like the start of an evil laugh, and Drakken has to choke down his for just another minute - "every machine those fingerprints land on will automatically self-destruct!"

There. _Now_ he can laugh. It wells inside him and pours out like a tidal wave, beyond anyone's control, and for the span of those few long rumbles, frustration and pain are extinct.

"How are you gonna get Dementor's fingerprints, though?" Shego asks, still with the tone of someone forced to watch an experiment whose effects won't be visible for the first day or two.

Drakken dismisses her with a wrist-wave of his own. "I'll steal something from his lair. Nothing big. Maybe one of those pricey coasters he's so fond of - "

"'Kay. And what happens if Dementor comes in here and starts touching all of YOUR gizmos?"

Drakken prepares a grin and loads it up with smugness. "I've already thought of that. The machine will be deactivated the _minute_ one of our security cameras catches sight of Dementor."

"Dang." Half of Shego's face seems pleased, the other disappointed. "But what if Dementor catches on and starts wearing gloves or something?"

Urk.

Drakken manages to swallow; better Shego bring this to light in the planning stages than someone yank it out mere minutes from his victory. "I'll - I suppose I could make it so the gloves also respond to the fingerprints..."

"Really." There's no hint of a question mark as Shego examines a blade-enhanced finger. "You're gonna make a _glove_ malfunction?"

His ego is in his throat. He cannot speak.

"Doc?" Shego nudges him in the side, and a yelp betrays him.

Everything on Shego is pointy - her eyebrows, her chin, her sense of humor - but her elbows are pointiest of all. When she nudges you with one, it's like getting skewered alive. (Well, what he imagines getting skewered alive would feel like. It's not a topic he spends a great amount of mental energy on.)

"I'll - I'll find a way," Drakken says. "I always do."

"Sure ya do," Shego says, only it reeks of irony.

A fiery collection of specks - some blood-red, some black with finality - confettis before Drakken's eyes. "GGNNN!" he rages.

Shego's lips twitch amusement. Drakken clamps his own together, tucks them under so tightly one would need the Jaws of Life to re-open them. Without another word - though he cannot contain the growls that insist on rasping up - he exists the room, leaving the door bashing back and forth on its hinges.

Pressure beats at his temples - the variety that stirs his brain to life rather than cripples it. The solution teases him from a distance, and all he needs are the right lenses to see it.

Drakken massages his forehead with the back of both thumbs as he enters his lab and boots up his PC. Shego insists that he needs to invest in a laptop and a wireless mouse like she has, and he will, someday, when the budget permits. In the meantime, there are so many more practical things they can purchase, such as combustible doormats. (Those traveling salesmen are a real bother at his mainland lairs. . .)

The screen blinks faithfully open to Google. Drakken cracks his knuckles one at a time, because Shego isn't here to scold him for it, and positions his fingers over the keys. "E-V-I-L," he types.

Before he can follow it up with "glove sabotage," it opens a drop-down suggestion box headed by "Evil Eye for the Bad Guy."

Drakken's muscles jerk as though electricity has been applied to them. The old-fashioned wired mouse hiccups in his grasp and ends up clicking the link, which Drakken wouldn't have chosen on his own. As enjoyable a diversion as their show has been over the years, he's still rather sore about the complete overhaul they performed on him when they met, alternate dimension or not.

Then again, Professor Dementor is still a loyal viewer, as far as Drakken knows. Perhaps he can bribe the Trio into crafting a set of booby-trapped (and oh-so-fashionable) gloves for Dementor. Offer them some slightly used TNT or something -

The website loads in a gradual parade of tasteful colors and sophisticated twelve-point font. _You vote, villains,_ it says, the blocky substance at the end of each letter captivating Drakken. _Tasty dish or prison chow?_

 _Oooh_ , now they're offering _recipes_? If anything can get them back in his good graces, Drakken muses, that would surely be it -

He taps his _down_ arrow key to see more. What engulfs his screen could not possibly be any further from a recipe.

The person in the picture is blue. The person in the picture is na - nude.

It takes Drakken much longer than it should to realize that the person in the picture is him.

Drakken hears himself begin a low-pitched keening sound, which rushes higher and higher until it hits the ceiling and shatters.

(His is no low ceiling, either.)

Drakken scrambles to his feet, overturning the keyboard in the process, and two years of crumbs rain to the floor. His fingers are futile stumps as he scrapes them at the screen, unable to scrub away the picture he now recognizes as the great and powerful Dr. Drakken emerging from the shower, grinning with relief when he spots a clean towel on the nearby sink-counter. A drawer's pulled out to block The Place, but everything else - torso, hips, legs - are exposed for the world to see. And rate.

He doesn't even care if they're good ratings. No matter how attractive his body is, it's still his, and he needs it to be wrapped in clothes and perched on a throne giving orders.

Somewhere inside him dwells Fearsome Emperor Drakken, who eyes this mockery and barks, " _Leave my presence_ this moment, _and I will consider allowing you to live!"_

Drakken could use him right now. Who is this other person he's been reduced to instead, who cradles toward the fetal position with his hands clasped behind his neck, terrified and undeserving of the devil's crown atop his chair that proclaims his supremacy?

Drakken glances at the picture once more, hoping, in fervent insanity, that he can somehow draw some bravery from the image of himself. But all he sees are the odd skin, pewter-blue in the bathroom's dim light; the sparse distribution of body hair; and the ungraceful proportions of his appendages - all things that only the bathroom walls have ever been privy to. (This is clever, Drakken decides, because _privy_ is also an antiquated term for _bathroom_.)

If Shego's a piece of uncooked spaghetti, then he's a cooked piece - all limp and skinny, all weak and floppy. There's very little fat and not much more muscle to ripple, but he undulates anyway through the power of sheer gawkiness.

He'd rather have laser eyes.

Drakken's knees buckle, clonking his chin against the desk's edge as he slams forward. In the movies that always gives people amnesia. Not here, and too bad, too, because he'd love to forget what he just saw.

Of course, even if he had, it'd still be right there, waiting on his screen to be seen for the first time again. Now maybe if he forgot who he was entirely - but then how would know he's destined to rule the world -

 _Dr. D! Shut up and focus!_ That's what Shego would be screaming right now.

With his heart knotted against his windpipe, Drakken makes repeated strikes at his frontal bone. Think. Think!

 _Shego. I need Shego. She needs to know about this._

 _No - wait - Shego is the LAST person I want to know about this!_

 _But she can fix it. She can fix anything. . ._

Nothing intelligible enters Drakken's mind, and none of the opposite sits on his tongue for once. He can't speak, can't push out even the first letter. He can only stare at the skinny shanks of his exposed legs and flush and boil and sob inside all at once.

After what must be decades, Drakken finally clicks on the tiny minus sign in the corner to relegate the window to a puny line on the toolbar and stares at his own vague reflection in the photo of a lightning strike that serves as his desktop. He's turned asparagus-green, and it doesn't look as pretty on him as it does on Shego. Plus, it looks like one of Zeus's thunderbolts is smiting him right in the chin.

Somehow, Shego knows. Somehow she hears the screech of terror that buffers in his throat and won't come out. She can listen to the gurgle and tell him what he ate for breakfast. Well, okay, they've never actually _tested_ that ability, but Drakken would not be surprised for one moment if she has it.

"Dr. D?" she calls through the wall.

Drakken makes a noise even he has never made before - one reminiscent of a rabbit with the life being slowly choked out of it. It's a bad day for a supervillain when he can't empathize more with the python in that equation.

As Shego's well-nigh-inaudible footsteps come tapping down the hall, Drakken makes fists and drives them into his eye sockets. Tears are beginning to form, but he'll be danged if he lets them out in front of Shego.

Shego appears in the doorway, her hair a curtain of poise about her. Even _her_ brows rear back at his expression - Shego, who seen him at his bleakest and remained unmoved. "You whined?" she says.

 _Bellowed_. She's supposed to say _bellowed_.

Drakken feels the trembling deep within him yet refuses to release it. He criss-crosses his legs and squeezes them tight in the same autopilot way he does when Kim Possible unfurls her kicking foot. He's suddenly, crushingly self-conscious about having a Place at all.

"What is it now?" Shego says.

"The Internet just destroyed my soul," Drakken says.

"Yeah, it tends to do that." Shego looks at him, quirk-mouthed. "Lemme guess - they canceled _Star Trek_. Again."

Shows what _she_ knows. The only change in television-schedule history that has gotten him to break down and weep is the phase-out of _The Six Tasks of Snowman Hank_. Drakken directs pure haughtiness at his sidekick as she strides across the floor toward his computer -

His computer!

"Don't touch it, Shego!" Drakken cries - and this time, it is an undisputed bellow. "Go no further!"

Shego glances back at him. The quirk is gone. There is only a gnarl to her upper lip. "'Kay - I presume you have a good reason for booby-trapping our computer?"

" _I_ didn't! _They_ did!"

"Oh, of course. The mysterious 'they,'" Shego says. "Are 'they' the same ones who set it up so you can never find a matching pair of socks?"

"NGGGH!" The misconceptions stuff Drakken's brain like wads of cotton, and the thoughts bulge against his temples as they fumble their way through. "The Evil Eye Trio! Remember them?" he says, dialing in a nasty tone.

"You mean those snots in tights?" Shego sniffs. "Didn't you say their lame makeover job just turned out to be some alternate-dimension garbage? Personally, I was just glad to get off the sitcom -"

"But they're real people, Shego! And they have a website! And today I logged on - by accident, but that's not important now - and I found they had posted pictures of me. And I'm n - na - " It is a two-syllable word, shorter even than _copper_ , much less _zirconium_ or some of his other favorites from the periodic table; it should not be this hard to say. "- n-n-not wearing clothes. Any. At all." Drakken shuts his eyes so he will not witness her reaction. "And they were inviting people to send in their assessments."

Shego mutters something derogatory, and possibly profane, under her breath. Drakken gets the feeling that, for once, it is not directed at him.

When his eyes open, he sees that Shego has dragged a chair over. She does not straddle it this time, instead seating herself with force, her spine as straight-cut as new paper. Her face is a flawless plaster mask.

"In the bathroom." Drakken answers the question before Shego can ask it and send his ego into convalescence. "Getting out of the shower. Strategically placed objects."

The answer comes out soaked in vinegar, and Shego's nose wrinkles as though she can smell it. "I guess that's their idea of a compliment, huh?" she says.

Typically even the _mention_ of a compliment (of any sort) would raise Drakken's head to meet it, yet now there is no counteracting his neck's negative slope. His lap, compressed with embarrassment, receives his glassy-eyed glares better than Shego would anyway.

Shego leans forward, those uncooked-pasta elbows perching on wiry knees, nauseating Drakken with the reminder of how protuberant his own knees were in the picture. "Dr. D," she says, "were _all_ the pics of you?"

"What do you -" Drakken's words lop off as his mind trips over a hazy form.

And he immediately feels useless for not having spied it beforehand.

"You mean - were there any pictures of - of - ofofofof - not the henchmen?" Drakken ventures. While he knows he's playing the part of a perfect fool all too well, he must avoid specifics. They will be like the moments after he first puts his contacts in. If that haze firms up, he'll never be able to live with it.

Shego's nod is disturbingly serious.

Rather than blushing as he expects, Drakken's cheeks numb and freeze. The sensation is terrifying. "N-n-none that I saw, no. Of course - I only saw the one - I wasn't looking - I saw just me - "

 _That_ is when the anger returns, with the refreshing sting of an antidote. "Is that even _legal_ , Shego?" Drakken demands.

"Since when do you care what's legal and what's not?" Shego says.

"Since ten minutes ago." Drakken concentrates on connecting the knobs of both ankles and keeping them there. "When they did that to me."

This earns him a grunt from Shego. "Well, at least you're honest."

He's danged. Drakken can detect it in his sinus cavities, the empty, astringent feeling up there. And then he can do absolutely nothing, not even blink, every cell galvanized to the core.

"I think the first thing we better do is check security," Shego says. Drakken has run up against many drill sergeants in his villain career, and not a one of them can match the commanding tip of Shego's head. "Then we're gonna bust into their studio and kick butt, agreed?"

Under most circumstances, Drakken resents it when she gives the orders. At this point, though, he is more occupied with her ignoring his leaking eyes and speaking to him as though he is the new recruit who simply needs some guidance before he can be an expert sharpshooter.

"Agreed," he says.

"Good." Shego marches over to the computer and flicks the mouse around.

To his own disgust, Drakken hears the rabbit-sound screech from him again. "Shego! No! Whatever you do, do _not_ reopen that browser!"

Not a crack shows in Shego's composure, at least not from behind. She smooths the cursor over to the toolbar, right-clicks the link, and Xes out of the Internet without ever returning to the website. "Like I wanna spend the rest of my life tryin' to unsee THAT," she mutters.

Somewhere in the cotton and the rage, Drakken is aware that he's been insulted. And he doesn't care. What _is_ this world coming to when he would rather be insulted like _that_ than complimented like _this_?

"Coming?" Shego says from the doorway.

Drakken nods and bunches his hands up and down the lengths of his arms. The well-crafted seams of his sleeves do little to reassure him. Even through his lab coat, he feels naked, now that the whole world has seen him that way.

And _that_ is what grinds his bite about the whole thing. Everyone with a modem has access to ninety-nine percent of Dr. Drakken's body, and they can easily guess at the other one percent. Women, even girls just Shego's age. All of the Evil Eye Trio's followers. Professor _Dementor_ , for Doomsday's sake!

His blue skin has always been a source of fear and disgust, one of the only sources he can control. _He_ decides how much is shown, how much horror he wants to induce. Now some external force has laid it bare for the population of the World Wide Web, and it's not intimidating - it's just freakish.

Pain crunches at the base of his back as Drakken follows Shego from the room. Command Central, home of the security cameras, is located at the very heart of the lair so that one never has to walk too far to find oneself there. This was a genius bit of design on his part, Drakken knows, and yet even this brief distance seems to be a trek through Death Valley.

If Death Valley were chilly. And had better decor.

Once arrived in Command Central, Drakken stares down at the sprawling array of buttons and switches. He _does_ possess full knowledge of why they exist and what they do - it's just been misplaced in the mass stampede up there. Between them and beneath the stain of someone's yogurt smear, Drakken spies his reflection.

His face is even paler than is customary, turning the scar even blacker and more jagged. Tears balance precariously on his bottom lids, and the shame makes it impossible to look at the rest of his body. It is encased behind something that feels like armadillo scales - cold, unfriendly armor. But at least he's protected, unlike the Evil Eye Trio.

He wants to watch Shego cinch a noose or three around their necks.

(This, Drakken decides, is also clever, because it saves him from having to figure out the plural of _noose_.)

Shego's seated before their bevy of security camera screens, eyes squinted, no more than tadpoles as she fiddles with dials and knobs. "Checking for drones," she says before Drakken can even ask.

"Drones?" Drakken repeats.

"Yeah, you know. The little unmanned robots that -"

"I'm _well_ aware of what a drone is, Shego!" Drakken stabs out his wilted chest. "In fact, if memory serves, _I_ was the one to educate _you_ -"

"WHATever," Shego says. Her fingers flit across the control panel, a couple of sharp-billed hummingbirds, activating each camera's memory and rewinding back through the footage. "Look, the Evil Tights Trio obviously didn't show up to take your picture them _selves_ , or your security system would've fried 'em to a crisp, right?"

Drakken nods, feeling his ponytail regain some of its upsweep. That's the most faith Shego's shown in his security system for quite a long time.

"So they must've sent a camera drone or some junk like that to snap photos of our bathroom," Shego finishes.

If only she would stop saying "our." Who knew that a simple pronoun could turn one's insides to paper mache?

And so Drakken jockeys into the seat next to Shego. They are swivel seats, ideal for a good old-fashioned rant-and-spin, but the thought doesn't even tempt him now. Not under the armadillo hide.

Drakken shivers. He doesn't stop shivering through fifteen minutes of fruitless (and droneless) searching. In the sixteenth minute, he plants his fist hard on the control panel - too hard, ouch - and cries, "Wait! I have it! That's _not_ our bathroom!"

"Now I'm even more disturbed," Shego says without missing a beat.

"No, no, it's true! Not here, anyway." Motion of his hands is necessary to work things into single file in Drakken's brain. "The. . . the pictures on the web - website were taken through a side window - _not_ a skylight, and that's all we have in this lair! BUT!" Drakken sticks the air with a finger. "We do have side windows at my last-resort lair. The one on the outskirts of Middleton? We laid low there for a few days?"

"You mean the one that should've been condemned years ago?" Shego says, and then the faintest sliver of light begins to dawn behind her marble face. "I never used that bathroom. It was the kind of thing that would show up in a health inspector's nightmares."

The truth rips away like a hangnail: searing pain and utter relief stream through Drakken. "Oh, good, so it's _just_ me." He takes a stab at sarcasm, and judging by the grim uptick of Shego's lips, it's not entirely successful.

"No, but it's good that now we know what we're dealing with." Shego throws her chair economically to one side and frees a path for her long legs. "So we're ready to go over there and talk to 'em."

"When you say 'talk,' do you mean 'talk' or 'rip their throats out'?" Drakken asks, surprised by the violence of his own metaphor, although he knows he shouldn't be. He is, after all, the one who nearly dropped Kim Possible to a very messy death by alligators a year before - before he decided it would be crueler to have her mind-controlled nana do it instead. He has ventured to darker territory than anyone will believe from him.

Shego forms a counterfeit smile. "Whichever one needs to happen."

A thrill steals down Drakken's backbone. He is once more in a darkened, moss-eaten lair, watching Kim Possible descend toward the alligators, one agonizing inch at a time.

Kim Possible. Nausea flares behind Drakken's tonsils. Is _she_ seeing this too? Drakken has it on good authority that she frequents the "legitimate" villain websites in hopes of gaining enough information for a takedown. Was the Makeover Incident not enough - and before that, the Belt Stolen By Robotic Horse Incident?

No, maybe the throat ripping will be literal, and maybe it will be done by him.

That thought is the only thing that enables Drakken to rise and declare, "Excellent, Shego! We shall show them what happens when you incur the wrath of DR. DRAKKEN!" The words, as they always do, have their own gravitational pull, warning everything else in their path to either fall into orbit around them or clear away.

* * *

Dr. Drakken's wrath grows and broods and itches on the hovercraft flight over to Evil Eye Headquarters. In his mind, he has already lit their little skintight jumpsuits on fire, sabotaged their sprinkler system to create a deadly flood, and sprinkled cyanide into their bowl of roasted almonds. Any good snob worth his weight in. . . .snobbery. . . has bowls of roasted almonds, right?

They land on an under-construction road the texture of the insides of Kit Kat bars; it has water leaping from their cups and isn't helping the condition of Drakken's stomach any. By the time Shego pulls the hovercraft to a jarring stop, Drakken has crunched his knuckles into the sides of the hovercraft and boiling breaths are coming through his nostrils.

He's never been here before. The building is all steel and metal and artful glass. At one point, Drakken would have been impressed, if not envious. The whole spread of the place appears beastly and vulgar to him now.

Shego swings herself out of the driver's seat as if made of liquid silver. Drakken follows at a stiffer pace, his arms clamped to his sides, each footstep an enormous undertaking. They open a front door into a notch of a room and immediately have to open another door perpendicular to the first one in order to actually enter, which seems a somewhat inefficient use of doors to Drakken.

But he doesn't have the luxury to nitpick architecture at this time. In a matter of minutes, he will be face-to-face-to-face-to-face with the evil Evil Eye Trio. Drakken always thought standing before them again would doom him to envision himself in scant Speedo bottoms and an abbreviated facsimile of a shirt.

Now he can't even envision himself in that much.

He feels the blush standing out like a rash from the freaky blue. Drakken slaps at his cheeks until it occurs to him that he is only stimulating the blood vessels further - making it worse, in other words. He drops his hands and scurries beside Shego, somehow taking two steps to her one even though she is an entire inch-and-a-half shorter than he is.

If HenchCo's lobby was an upscale doctor's waiting room, Evil Eye Headquarters is the lobby of a hotel - a very fancy hotel. The smell of fresh-baked pastries and iced coffee. Wall-to-wall carpeting without blemish. Richly upholstered chairs. A magazine rack. Plates of brass on the walls that serve no purpose other than to redirect light and look cool.

Drakken is not delighted, but he is dazzled. He doesn't even see the welcome desk until he hits it, square in the abs that have been made very public without his permission.

The receptionist glances up from her computer as though rattled by the collision. She's had so much plastic surgery done she resembles a snub-nosed Himalayan monkey, and she's not even that much older than Drakken himself. Maybe five, ten years. He doesn't know what to say to her.

Shego slips herself between the two of them. "Hi there," she says. Her coo is an encrypted threat; it translates to, _You have one chance to do EXACTLY what I say or I bring out the pain_. "We've been having a little issue with your website."

The receptionist has already returned her red fingernails to her keyboard. "You're not alone. The servers are due for an overhaul, especially with all the extra traffic they've been getting lately."

Drakken barely hears her, barely observes the room as he begins to crust over. He scratches his chest-inch with plain, bare facts: He is smarter than they are; he's certainly more ambitious, striving for a level of success they will never reach even if their show is syndicated on six continents. When his scheme works, he will have the authority to execute them for their crimes, and really there's no reason for him to be intimidated by them. . . except that they've seen him, all of him.

And now they're using it as bait.

And it's apparently working, Drakken realizes as the receptionist's words poke through. The visions begin again - in each one, the Evil Eye Trio's deaths are more prolonged, and the scales hug him tighter.

"No, not that kind of trouble." The sardonic bend to Shego's voice drags the receptionist's gaze back her way. "It's what's ON their website."

"What's on the website?" the receptionist asks.

"Nude photos." Shego points Drakken's way. "Of him."

His scales aren't working. The words seem to blister the ambiance of the room, and the conflagration within him in worse than any chemical burn Drakken has ever suffered.

The receptionist covers her mouth with a hand, yet a gasp slips between her heavy rings anyway. Her eyes, stretched at the corners, have very little standing between them and thin air - except for the watery film that Drakken has the nasty inkling is for him.

Preposterous. People do not cry for Dr. Drakken. They cry _from_ him.

Well, sometimes.

Okay, so they haven't yet. But boy, is that about to change.

Drakken and Shego are shown to seats and handed complementary refreshments. Their lemonade has a clean scent and is a tasteful pale yellow instead of looking like a filthy street puddle the way Drakken's always comes out. He rips a chocolate chip muffin into fours and pokes at the loose crumbs. Not many things can make Dr. Drakken lose his appetite, but the knowledge that people are seeing his bare almost-everything plastered all over the Internet is sending his stomach into spasms.

"How you holding up, Doc?" Shego asks.

Her eyes are instruments of excavation; he cannot meet them. "Fine," Drakken says to his lap.

"Liar," Shego says. "You're a wreck, and I can't blame you."

She _can't_? Well, that's new. . . if not unwelcome. "Well, perhaps I'm just conducting a scientific dissection," Drakken says.

"Right," Shego says. "You're gonna find the cure for cancer any second now."

Drakken begins his deepest, rumbliest groan. For a moment, he can almost pretend this is a standard day - until an internal door swings open and a bright young thing with tight-cropped hair comes out and says, "Dr. Drakken. The Evil Eye Trio will see you now."

Even with the small metal scrap of a nametag proclaiming him an intern, the kid speaks as professionally as a nurse practitioner. As Drakken stalks through the door with its wavy glass that has apparently never been touched by fingerprints or noseprints, he almost wishes he were being wheeled in for surgery instead. At least then he'd be anesthetized. He glances over his shoulder to make certain Shego is right behind him.

The Trio's office, down a short, velvety hallway, smells like fresh toothpaste, the kind where the mint is so sharp it makes all your taste buds stand out. The intern gets Drakken and Shego settled and gives them the knee-wobbling report that the Evil Eye Trio will be with them shortly. Drakken showcases his evil aptitude by sneering the kid out of the room. As soon as _this_ door - a thing sleek and gray as a sportfish - closes, Shego turns and gives Drakken a look chiseled from pure annoyance.

In spite of Shego's near-palpable irritation with them, his tumors-for-knees keep knocking. (Of course, the threat of her ire could be upsetting them _more_ , but does she consider that? Noooo. . . and he can never let on that he fears her.)

It'll be hard enough to hide that from the polished Trio he will soon stand before. Drakken takes a moment to tidy up his form, whiffing his breath into his hands to confirm he remembered to brush this morning and plowing his fingers through his hair-spikes. Shego gripes at him to sit still, but he can't, he can't, he can't, and he's still pacing roundabouts when the streamlined door swings open.

There they are, the Evil Eye Trio, in their slim-fitting lavender suits and matching tights, gloves off, each holding a Styrofoam cup of that delicious lemonade they don't deserve to enjoy. One whose upper lip is about six times fuller than his lower. One who wears small square-framed glasses that are somehow not geekish. One whose hair lies back from his forehead like satin.

It is as if a bucket of dry ice has spilled in with them, and for exactly three-quarters of a second, Drakken is frozen.

Big Lip extends his hand in greeting, but Drakken can't supply his own in return. He feels degraded and small, incapable of bringing himself any closer.

"Hello, Dr. Drakken," Big Lip says. His smile is white and warm - and ugly. "Just the villain we wanted to see."

That does it. Drakken throws himself into Big Lip's face faster than you can say "showdown." "Yes, apparently I was!" he says. "And see me you did! Now you're making sure everyone else sees me, too!" His voice tastes bitter as he disgorges sentences to find only baseless syllables taking their place. He's come into this without a game plan, Drakken realizes: should he use arrogance or rage?

The arrogance is basically a warranty. It will cover his shame - but only to a certain extent. Drakken has felt this kind of rage before, the kind that leads to death, his enemies spared by failure rather than scruples. Now it has multiplied, too large for his exploited body to contain, and if he had Shego's powers he would not hesitate in the slightest to burn them to a crisp.

A milligram of himself counters that he does not want to go this direction. It pops up from time to time, and right now it is every bit as infernal as Kim Possible. Its end would be a victory.

Drakken makes a non-decision to employ the strongest of both forces. "Where do you get off, thinking you can send drones over to people's secret lairs and take - take - take - those kind of - of -"

"Compromising," Shego supplies. Bless her. She really does deserve a raise, if only he didn't have to forego paying the water bill to grant it.

"Yes, compromising pictures! How did you even know where that lair was in the first place? It's _secret_ \- hello? You cannot plaster my - compromised - image" - yes, that's right; he's _compromised_ , like a slide sample taken out of the incubator too soon - "all over the Internet just to help your ratings. . .although I will admit, you definitely picked the right villain to feature in all his savor-fare!"

The instant he's swished the words out, Drakken knows he's pronounced them wrong. The bluster goes out of his air - air goes out of his bluster - something about air and bluster - the point being that he droops like a bloodhound's wrinkles.

Big Lip doesn't seem to notice. "We certainly did," he says. "Didn't we, boys?"

He motions to Non-Geek, who sidles forward and pokes the top of Drakken's rib cage, too softly and quickly to invoke the yelping mechanism. "Absolutely," Non-Geek says. "Dr. Drakken, you are a credit to your profession."

Slick Hair joins his compatriots. "Please do forgive us. Our only crime is that we attempted to take the credit for how amazing you look."

If words can shimmer, these do. Sunlight glides in through a window and halos Drakken's reflection in the coffee table. A little squint, a little imagination, and it could be a crown. Drakken feels an insidious smile creep into place.

He can see it now - the fans lined up, begging for his autograph; his fellow villains, including that cheeky runt Dementor and the wonderfully poised Senior, wondering aloud how Drakken manages such an image in addition to feeding his brainpower; Drakken himself replying, with as much modesty as such greatness can allow, that it is all natural.

"Dr. D!" Shego snaps her fingers in his face. "Wake up! They're trying to play your ego."

"Hmm?" Drakken says dreamily. He glances at the Evil Eye Trio again. They are glowing from outside the sun's reach, and Drakken is suddenly reminded of radium - beautiful, brilliant, and poisonous.

They were - they had - they - the _fiends_!

Drakken's heart shrivels to a burnt coal inside him. All the better, he supposes, for dealing with these three pieces of biowaste.

"This racket you're running - where do you plan to go with it?" Drakken sputters. "Surely you must have realized you're in violation of the law! Some law -" Drakken adds before they can question him - "somewhere - I'm pretty positive. . ."

"My, my!" Big Lip turns to Non-Geek. "It appears we're in violation of the _law_. What do you say to that?"

"My, my. I'd say that's pretty ironic coming from him," Non-Geek says with the over-enunciation of a third-grader in a school play.

"I wonder who his civil lawyer is," Slick Hair muses. "Because he's got to have one, right?"

For an instant, the room goes so lividly white-hot that Drakken can't breathe, can barely make out the leather sofa and the floor scrubbed to a shine. "It's not _smart_ to taunt the world's future overlord!" he says. He's not crying - far from it - but sounds are coming out of him that usually issue from shampoo bottles that you can't convince to give up the last drop. "Once I take power, I will make sure you three are among the first to be exe -"

A grip like uncooked spaghetti lands on his back. Drakken can sense the barely-restrained cruelty in it and knows at once who it must be. He takes a step back to let her pass and resigns himself to more wordless curses of the Trio before him. Shego's definitely muttering about their resemblance to several different animals' hindquarters.

Drakken does his best to tune her out. He's thought enough about hindquarters for one day. (Or one lifetime.)

Yet Shego delivers her, "All right. Lesson time, boys and girls," with the sudden violence of a switchblade, and Drakken finds himself leaning forward. He doesn't want to miss this.

"Okay, so, my degree may not be in law," Shego says. "And I don't know who got it in their pretty little head that this is a good idea, but let me tell you something. Taking THOSE kinds of pictures of people - without their permission - and slapping them on the Internet is pretty universally frowned upon."

There is another cowed silence, only this time the cow is on the other shoe. . . or something similar. Smugness expands Drakken. He has never been so proud of his sidekick.

The smiles disintegrate, one by one. "What do you even care?" Big Lip says. The inflated upper half of his mouth is set to curl.

Shego's eyebrows fly up. "First of all, he's my employer. Second of all, it's disgusting, and third - how do I know I won't be next?"

Drakken shuts his eyelids against that last one, tells himself it's a good argument and nothing more.

"Ohhh, of _course_ not." Non-Geek's empathetic expression is lab-grown - a phrase that Drakken never dreamed could be an insult until now. "We would never dream of doing that to a lady."

"Dr. D. _is_ a lady!" Shego snaps.

Drakken feels his face drop. That seems rather unnecessary.

"We've got pictures that prove otherwise," Slick Hair says. He holds up his palm, and Non-Geek meets it with his own.

Drakken's throat is the texture of sandpaper with several atomic fireballs lumped in beneath it. He would gladly open up and obliterate the entire studio if he could find a way to secure himself and Shego first.

And if obliteration wasn't too good for them. No, what Drakken wants is to destroy their dignity, pare it away as they did with his.

The thought would sit uncomfortably in his chest if there weren't already a hunk of coal there. Instead, it reigns marvelously depraved.

"I don't suppose you could at least _try_ to see it from our perspective?" Non-Geek asks. Without whining. Without wheedling. He is so deviously pleasant that Drakken's contacts begin to itch.

"And that would be what? The perspective from your drone?" Drakken cocks his tone like a fist. Much as he wishes to envision himself rending these toothpick-men limb from limb, such images are so foreign the right hemisphere of his brain can't upload them properly.

"We've been killing it in the ratings lately," Slick Hair says, suddenly also all kindness. "But our website just hasn't generated the kind of traffic that our studio expects. We thought this might help us snag that female demographic we've been so struggling to reach. You understand, don't you?"

Drakken doesn't, not entirely, but he will not let them see that. Lost ground doesn't count as lost if confidence cloaks it from the enemy, after all.

Slick Hair winks, and then Drakken does understand: he is nothing more than a specimen.

And it wouldn't matter if he were wearing chain mail - he's naked.

This time, however, there is no urge to crisscross his legs and duck from the camera. Drakken spans the distance in a few furious steps, fingers clawed forward in a stranglehold, and it would work, it _would_ , if the toe of his boot didn't catch the fringe of what Drakken believes is called an accent rug and knock him to the ground. Drakken's left in a half-kneel, looking _up_ at Slick Hair, at the most solemn-eyed, scolding gaze he's seen since his eighth-grade math teacher. It is a look of reduction.

Drakken shoots to his feet, dusting off his lab coat and fishing for his arrogance. Rage obviously isn't working. "Your little mind games won't work with me," he says right into that pristinely combed forelock. "You may have taken note of the looks" - he preens his ponytail - "but you didn't count on the brains, did you?"

Slick Hair doesn't exactly quaver in fear, and his fingers don't tighten on the cup. In fact, the man gives Drakken a long, disgusted look that lingers on his soul.

Disgust is born of fear, right?

"You. Are. Going. Down," Drakken spits. If it weren't for the odd creak to his words, sounding both too young and too old, it would be a fearsome vocal display.

Big Lip turns up a moisturized palm. "Are you honestly going to waste your money taking us to court?"

"Who said anything about _court_?" That's Shego. Her eyes have taken on their famed green gleam, the one that matches what comes out of her hands when she clicks them forward.

 _Now_ fear blankets them, squeezing the Styrofoam until it screams in protest. It is the day's best development since the Cocoa Pebbles. Drakken could hug Shego, plasma and all.

"So. . . let's bargain," Shego says, bringing the flame closer. "You take down those pics. You never post another compromising photo of a villain without their permission again. And I won't send you to the ICU." She tips her head in pseudo-innocence. "Or the morgue. Understand?"

There's silence; there always is when Shego is mad. The anger creates strong, graceful ripples in her voice, rather than snapping it and scattering the pieces asunder as it does for Drakken. Yet he does manage to saunter to her side, hang his arms in a lazy fold across his chest so they don't dangle, and drawl - he's been practicing his drawl on and off since his stint at the dude ranch - "She said, _do you understand?_ "

They nod.

"Cross your hearts!" Drakken barks. This whole "Internet" thing is just too hazardous to leave anything up to chance.

They obey. _Obey_ \- is there any better word in the English language?

"Okay. Looks like we're done here, then." With a flick of her wrist, Shego extinguishes the flame and dials up a charming grin that looks shy instead of _sly_ , as if there's a typo on her prompter - except Drakken knows it's just Shego's method for being even sneakier. "Hey - to show there's no hard feelings, how 'bout I throw away those cups you've ruined?"

Drakken nearly howls in delight. The sides of all three cups have collapsed in on each other, the bottoms gutted out and leaking lemonade onto that cursed rug.

The first flickers of sheepishness cross the Trio's faces. There are triplet nods. Shego's feet hardly appear to touch the ground as she gathers one cup after another and glides to the door with Drakken pacing smartly behind her. She's already passed through the doorway when Drakken stops in it and cranes around one last time.

The Evil Eye Trio stares back at him, lips lifted and noses curled, every scrap as if they're in the right. Drakken smiles in response, the way his sharks tend to do when raw meat hits the water. Well, not _exactly_ the same way, since a shark's mind functions differently from a human's, and so do their jaws - they have somewhere around seven rows of teeth, which is more plentiful even than Drakken's mouthful. Point being, the look communicates that they have just barely escaped their own mauling.

"The end," Drakken says, because he can think of nothing that carries more finality than that. He can see his own cheeks, and they no longer have the feel of stovetop burners.

Matter of fact, for a glorious, terrifying moment, he has no warmth in his entire body.

On that note, Drakken spins on one heel, loses his balance and quickly recaptures it before he can fall, and swaggers down the hall as though he owns this place. He doesn't, of course - this hallway is too small, too narrow, not a corridor of fright at all, and the ceiling's far too low. Still, attitude is nine-tenths of ownership, at least in the villain world.

Shego dumps the remaining lemonade into a trash can far too dolled-up for its own good, and then she plunks the cups with precision into Drakken's arms. "There ya go, Doc. Have fun with that."

Drakken blinks. "Wha?"

"You're the slowest excuse for a genius I've ever seen," Shego says. She eases a nail through a dent in the side of one cup, eyes rolling. "You've got their fingerprints. Do your thing."

The second it registers, her scoffing no longer matters. Hardly anything matters as the scheme pulls down its bars and flashes its lights, stranding his words behind at the railroad crossing until each picture-turned-pathway-turned-blueprint hurtles past with a deafening roar. "My DNA Discl -" Drakken begins.

"Yeah, only quieter," Shego whispers. "I'm assuming you don't _want_ everyone to know the plan." Her mouth twitches. "And what a stupid name that is."

Any potential sting bounces off Drakken. For now, he and Shego are two lines drawn in the same coordinate plane; they have their differences but are gunning for the same end. Were they back in their own domain, he would feel downright. . . well, clothed. Uncompromised.

Drakken rubs at his skin, over and over and over again. Its blue seems tarnished in the glaring lights. "Let's get out of here," he grunts as softly as he can. "This place gives me the jeebies."

"The _jeebies_?"

"And I need to be able to gloat freely," Drakken says. He gives his neck one more good scratch to see if the scales have retracted, unsure whether or not he wants them to stick around.

"Natch."

The receptionist offers Drakken another muffin and another display of sympathy as they leave. He accepts them both, his madman's laugh back in the hovercraft a shower of crumbs. Vengeance is tasty enough on its own, but there's nothing that can't be improved with free chocolate chips.

And he will forevermore be able to bathe in peace, even if he never manages to say the word "shower" to Shego again - which is fine, because _that_ will not make him stink.

Bad enough to be an armadillo with charcoal sitting in his chest. But perhaps that is the transitional form before true brazen evil bursts through.

* * *

A week later, _Villains_ magazine reports that the Evil Eye Trio having trouble with their equipment. Though they hate for their expensive gloves to touch oily machinery, _for some reason_ the smallest ungloved touch is a death sentence for their drones, and even some of the TV cameras they've tried to handle themselves have abruptly malfunctioned.

Also, their receptionist has quit.


	38. Chosen

**~My apologies to anyone who was wondering where I got zapped to another planet. Well, better late than never, right? Thanks for your patience, guys.**

 **Now, speaking of other planets. . .**

 **Timeline: Post-series. ~**

Sometimes, Dr. Drakken wonders if he will ever miss villainy.

His shoulders feel stronger now that they don't have to be kept in a constant crouch so that he can look over them every five seconds for any trace of a foe. He certainly can live without prison, will never pine for those cells the size of a FedEx box, with the temperature that fluctuated between miserably hot and miserably cold and was always heavy with the stink of defeat. And it's wonderful that he no longer has to fabricate a life for Mother's benefit - he can now tell her every aspect of it, apart from the Global Justice confidentials.

No, it's the light-up of a scheme in your mind, the tingle of power as it crept closer to your grasp, the thrill of seeing your photo in the newspaper even if it _was_ on the same page as the opening of a new local pet store, that Drakken wonders if he will miss.

So far - two months, three weeks, and five days into his reformation - he hasn't.

Drakken smiles at the happy blue dots decorating the front of his house as he fumbles the key into the lock, twilight air cooling his face. An actual house awaits him. It's not as grandiose as the palace where he always imagined himself living, but the ceilings are lofty, the walls wide, the driveway's square corners perfect for accommodating the hovercraft like one of those egg-in-a-box geometry problems he was one of the first junior-high-schoolers to ace.

Though the enormous TV screen had to be rehomed for his budget's sake, there is still the long narrow couch with three maroon cushions to sit on and three nearly-identical ones making up the back for optimal lumbar support. Still the overstuffed old Thinking Chair in the corner. Still the cozy end table with the gray rectangle of a phone snapped smartly on top of it. Drakken makes his way to each item in turn, silently greeting it. A silly ritual, perhaps, but one that secures him. It is good to make sure they are all where he left them and that they, too, are acclimating to their new reality.

Drakken runs to his bedroom and does a quick once-over. Medal still catching the early-evening sun in its gold. Bed still enormous and festive red. Satisfied, he makes a loop down the hallway into the kitchen, where he checks to be certain there's one more container of instant macaroni-and-cheese left for supper and fixes himself a plate of four Oreos and a glass of milk.

 _Ahh_ , that hits the spot. (Wherever the "spot" is.) Drakken dunks a cookie into the milk and stirs thoughtfully. Let's see, after this he can make his nightly phone call to Shego. Then he can work in the spare room down the hall he designated as his lab - because he couldn't bear to live _anywhere_ that didn't have a lab - until he gets hungry enough for dinner, and then. . .

A hum from his pocket throws those plans ajar. Drakken pulls out his cell phone and glances at the letters on the screen. They read _GLOBAL JUSTICE_ before his brain jumbles them into a nonsense anagram, and his heartbeat increases to a rodent-rivaling speed.

He's always dreamed of Dr. Director contacting him after normal office hours with something urgent. She _has_ called him a few times, but it's always been to tell him he left his lunch box behind or something.

Drakken flips open the phone and nudges it to his ear. "Hello, Dr. Drakken speaking." His baritone threatens to ride up into tenor, and he thwarts it by dragging it down to bass.

"Dr. Drakken," Dr. Director says. Drakken immediately straightens when he hears her voice, that voice that speaks of secret hidden things with conviction and clarity and good humor. "A pressing matter has come up at Global Justice, and your presence is required as soon as possible."

Drakken knows his eyes are widening. "So. . . it's _not_ my lunch box, then?" It's either say that or remain silent, and as he looks at the lunch box he brought home with him, he suspects he should have opted for silence.

"Certainly not," Dr. Director says. A hint of amusement creeps in. "We've received a transmission."

"Ooh! Is it from one of our operatives in the field?" Drakken blurts, though he knows Dr. Director would never contact _him_ for that. He simply loves to say those words, _operatives in the field_. . .

"No. It's an interplanetary transmission," Dr. Director says.

Drakken feels the old fear-skip, like a scratch on a record, same as when he first stood before Warmonga not yet gifted with his powers, only trickery and deceit that finally served him well. He puts two fingers to the taut place on his neck where the vines stand alert and says, "No fooling?"

"No fooling at all." Dr. Director pauses. "They're asking to speak to the human with the blue skin."

It isn't a fear-skip this time. It's an enormous straw suctioning all the moisture from Drakken's mouth and his throat, and soon it will siphon all the air from his lungs as well. He has no idea how he manages to get out, "I'll be right there." Maybe the vines themselves say it.

"That would be ideal. See you soon, Dr. Drakken." Dr. Director hangs up.

Drakken tries not to hear the hum of a spacecraft's boosters in the dial tone.

* * *

He is not panicking.

Things aren't always what they seem, Drakken tells himself - over and over - as he steers the hovercraft toward GJHQ. For example, right now it appears that the top of the sky is darkening and lowering and pushing the sun out of sight, even though what's _really_ happening is that the sun is simply fading from view as this hemisphere of the Earth rotates away from it.

There's always the chance that this alien isn't from Lorwardia. There's always the chance that his Brainwashing Shampoo (and Cranium Rinse) broadcast was intercepted by another planet with more peaceful denizens. Even if it _is_ a Lorwardian, there's always the chance that it has nothing to do with Warhok and Warmonga.

The _late_ Warhok and Warmonga.

Drakken shimmies against the sudden bugs-down-the-back sensation. Warhok and Warmonga were obviously… an item, to use some hip teenage slang. Did they have kids? A family? Is there someone he should have sent a fruit basket?

Do the Lorwardians believe he lured Warmonga here with his video and then tricked her into being his servant? (Because only the second half of that is true.) Do they know his deception is the reason she returned? Do they blame him that their leaders met such a violent end?

If Earth and Lorwardia go to war -

Drakken curls his fists around the steering gears and hangs on so that his normally-baggy sleeves fill with tight arms. Shego might count that as panicking.

The fear is certainly skipping, and a crazy part of him - Drakken thinks it might be his conscience - wishes he _were_ standing before Warmonga for the first time. . . telling her the truth and sending her on her way. Even if she was the most qualified ally he'd ever dreamed of, physically superior to any of Earth's wrestlers and armed with intergalactic weaponry, just in case she and her brood's appearances weren't enough to intimidate. The scar on Drakken's own cheek has always felt so noticeable, charred-black and crumpled like a hamburger left too long on the grill.

In the company of the Lorwardians, it became no more obtrusive than a pen smear.

Drakken spies the building and swoops the hovercraft down for a landing. It's silly to wish those things. There's no way to travel back in time and thank Warmonga for her jailbreak/abduction, no way to change his order to lock Shego in chains, no way to summon her now and apologize that she lost her life for such a pointless cause.

The only thing to do is face the trail of damage he's left behind like a tornado.

He gulps as he jams the hovercraft into a parking spot. _Oooh_ , this is so much scarier than walking into a dark alley alone. At night. In a bad neighborhood.

Dr. Director meets him in the underground lobby, her forehead smooth and her mouth in a serious line. Drakken has never seen her frightened before, so he has no idea how that would look. Yet the cool, calm hand she uses to squeeze his has the first few droplets of sweat he's ever felt on it.

"Dr. Drakken," Dr. Director says. "Thank you for coming."

"Dr. Director. You're welcome." Drakken salutes her with a palm twenty thousand times clammier than her own. He's trying to send up prayers at the same time, but if anything beyond wild static makes it to heaven, he'll be surprised.

"Lorbin from Lorwardia has asked to confer with you." Dr. Director locks her hands behind her back, her walk as straight and elegant as the Eiffel Tower as she treks down one of the labyrinth's halls with him.

 _Treks_. Oooh, poor choice of words there. It makes Drakken think of _Star Trek_ , which makes him think of aliens, which makes him envision all the sadistic ways aliens find to kill people in science fiction, horrifying ends that even the darkest crevices of Dr. Drakken's brain couldn't dream up.

"Did he ever mention my name?" Drakken says. Even his saintly seventh-grade science teacher would have to admit that is a stupid question, but there is still a coward thrashing in his veins.

Dr. Director closes her eye and rolls her lips, what she always does when she is fending off a chuckle. Although embarrassing, chuckling must be a good sign; surely she would not be moved to chuckle if the life of one of her scientists hung in the balance?

"Technically, no," she says. "He simply asked us to contact the blue man who could sprout flowers."

Drakken swallows hard.

Dr. Director turns in front of a closed doorway and touches Drakken's wrist. "I wouldn't worry too much. Our aerial scans have picked up no threats within Earth's atmosphere," she says, with the same heaping dose of respect that seasons everything she tells him. It's such a glorious feeling, like dipping a toe into the hot tub after freezing goose bumps into your skin in an off-season pool. So wonderful that Drakken vows he'll always strive to do his best from this day forward.

Part of Drakken shifts uneasily, wonders how that's different from the effort and toil he put into his years as a villain.

And then he remembers - that was him striving to do his _worst_.

The maniac's smile he recalls looms entirely too close. Drakken fastens his gaze to Dr. Director and his nervous system with it. "Stay with me?" he pipes.

"We'll be right there if you need anything," Dr. Director says. "Global Justice does not abandon its own."

Drakken feels the curve of his ponytail swing a teensy bit higher.

The scanner outside the door reads Dr. Director's handprint and allows her access to the room. A space is left behind as the door retracts into the wall, and Drakken follows her through it. He hasn't been in this room - large and chilled with a subtle hum to the air - before, and he immediately begins to take stock of its many distractingly incredible furnishings.

Automated laser detectors peeking from holes in the ceiling. A glass table where paper cups are stacked next to a coffeepot some time-traveling agent must have brought back from the thirty-first century. A whole wall taken up on the bottom with shelves of switches and dials and sensors and on top with screens wider than a henchman's arm-span.

A Lorwardian.

The fact that he's merely displayed on one of those screens is the only thing that banishes Drakken's would-be gasp back into hiding. In a vague way, he notices the Lorwardian's hair, too, is ponytailed, anchored with sternness to the top of his leathery head. The small red loop keeping it there looks to be solid metal, likely a kind that isn't native to Earth.

All of a sudden, Drakken envisions Warhok, with his hollow yellow eyes; his muscles delineated even in his face, heightened by the sharp markings of war paint. . . or tattoos. . . or whatever those were.

 _This_ alien, although still huge, appears pleasant by comparison. The tattoo on his chest is smaller, and his cubic pectorals don't jut forward as aggressively. He has the same yellow, pupil-free eyes, but unlike Warhok's, his are traced with scarlet around the edges. The angles of his nose and chin, sharp enough to puncture, are tilted downward in acknowledgment of the damage they can do.

For once in his life, Drakken is completely silent. Even the chipped-up noises that always seem to signal the severance of nerves in his brain - even they fall apart on his lips. He's vaguely aware of his shinbones clacking together like a pair of cymbals.

He can't remember this guy's name. Is it London? Lowden? Ron Stoppable? (He knows he knows _some_ one named Stoppable. . .)

"I am told you are Dr. Drakken," says the guy whose name Drakken might very well be executed for not remembering.

Drakken nods his affirmation.

The guy's voice is deeper, thicker, a parody of Warhok's domineering one. "I am Lorbin, and I come in the name of Lorwardia, from beyond the seventh star."

Phew. Dodged that bullet. Or missile. More likely it would have been a missile.

"I. .. I welcome your transmission in the name. . . the name of Earth," Drakken says. Feeling rather like he's been poked in the abdomen, he makes a weak gesture toward the table Lorbin can't reach. "Coffee?"

Lorbin shakes his mammoth head, looking just a touch confused. "No, Dr. Drakken. We did not come to coffee. We came to speak to the one who deposed Warhok and Warmonga."

The poke revs up to a drilling sensation. Drakken recalls the staggering hatred on Warmonga's face, the murder tensed in her body as she struggled against his vines. . . just before he spun the hovercraft around and took off to save the world. The last time he'd ever see her.

Now he is to be called a murdering fiend - the very thing that would have seemed such a compliment two months, three weeks, and five days ago.

"Look, I wasn't the one who blew them up," Drakken blurts, and he isn't sure if he's sharing credit or deflecting blame. His life has been inverted so quickly that sometimes he still gets whiplash. "That was - somebody else. . . whose name. . ."

"Dr. Drakken."

Drakken glances up from the petrified fingertips he's ramming together. "Yes?"

Lorbin leans toward the screen, and Drakken watches the elephantine brow lower. "We wish to thank you."

If the man had said, _Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers, a peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked_ \- recited it straight through with nary a stumble - Drakken could not have been more surprised.

"You wish to _what_?" Drakken says. The flowers must take his yelp as a summons, because when he lifts his hands to clutch his hair, they collide with normally-silky petals now stunned stiff.

Lorbin steeples his fingers and does a level examination of Drakken. Forensics wouldn't be able to detect a trace of malice if they ran his expression. "Ah. The flowers. You were mocked for those, weren't you?" he says.

Drakken's shoulders bristle, shivering the petals with them. The memory of their serrating laughter goes straight through him and out the other side, yet the boom has not deserted him when he says, "Urrrghk. Yes."

"I thought so. Warhok and Warmonga were cruel to all species." Lorbin pauses. "Including their own."

Drakken blinks until the face before him smudges to a bowl of pea soup. If ears could blink, they'd be doing it, too. "Wait. . . you didn't _like_ Warhok?" he says, in case he's heard wrong, in case war is about to descend to Earth after all.

"Warhok ruled by fear. He was a tyrant, descended from a line of usurpers who claimed the Lorwardian throne hundreds of years ago," Lorbin says. "He chose Warmonga as his battle-mate because she was stronger and fiercer than any the others hoping to be queen. We followed orders and hoped that the day of the Great Blue's deliverance would be soon."

 _The Great Blue._

At the sound of the words, Drakken's respiratory system chokes to a halt, and he must pound it back into working order. Their sparkle is menacing, hiding a deadly dull finish that collapses back in on itself. For a frightful moment, they fill his insides and inflate there, determined to seize control away from whatever sense of decency he has managed to build up.

He begins to babble them away. "Oh, yes, _that_ Great Blue. Warmonga talked about him all the time. Must be a heck of a guy. I'd love to meet him someday - you know, when you discover him. We could sing the being-blue blues together. Get it? The _blues_ -"

Lorbin watches Drakken silently. Only when Drakken's increasing incoherence cuts itself off does Lorbin hold up a broad green hand. "Yes, Warmonga spoke much of the Great Blue. She and Warhok badly distorted the ancient prophecies."

"There were ancient prophecies?" Drakken says. Even though that's not the sort of thing he usually puts too much clout in, it's as if a zipper has pinged up and down his spine. Such earnest reverence can be catching.

(Plus, he sounds almost exactly like Thor did in those old Saturday morning cartoons!)

"Indeed." Lorbin's hands fold in front of him. "The Great Blue was described as the one who would lead our kind from beyond the stars."

"Yes. I've heard that before," Drakken says with a grimace. Recalling how Warmonga boomed those words at their first meeting is like being pelted with an eyeful of iodine that all the cold-water flushes in the world won't fix. He can't pretend he'll miss her, nor that he's not relieved she's gone from the world, and yet the thought of her end is not a jubilant one.

Lorbin's scarlet-rimmed yellow eyes bear more of a resemblance to an autumn leaf than a beacon of death, Drakken decides. "Myself and several other scholars of the prophecy have examined it contextually" - and the phrase is so professional that Drakken thrills to hear it - "and we believe the Great Blue was meant to usher in peace and prosperity, to free us from oppression and help us live in harmony with other species."

Drakken can no longer feel the soles of his feet, only the stranglehold his ego is held in by the rest of his soul.

Lorbin shakes his head, the size and shape of Paul Bunyan's mythical ax. "Warhok, like his ancestors before him, twisted the prophecy, turning the Great Blue into a harbinger. Freedom from oppression became freedom _to_ oppress, and in their minds, the Great Blue was the one who would win them the universe."

"Good luck with _that_ one," Drakken says. "Isn't the universe constantly expanding?"

The line would be perfect to garnish with a smirk - something just beyond Drakken's reach. Part of him is still gaping inside, aghast. He spent twenty-plus years of his life trying (and failing) to take control of just _one_ planet in just _one_ solar system in just _one_ galaxy, and they were after the whole shebang, whatever a "shebang" is? The realization that they brought far more expertise to the task is enough to freeze the marrow right in Drakken's bones.

Lorbin smiles for the first time, the corners of his mouth pulling back in wearied pleats. "Yes, it is. But you could not reason with Warhok and Warmonga."

"You don't have to tell _me_ twice," Drakken says. A sudden wondering surge comes over him - just how ghastly _was_ life under Warhok and Warmonga? - and one heel begins to twist in place on the polished floor.

"I will stop at one time, then," Lorbin says before Drakken can voice any further questions. "It had long been hoped that the Great Blue would one day arrive and restore the throne to Lorwardia's rightful king. Now that Warhok and Warmonga are no more, his descendents will return to power."

Drakken has to drop like an anchor into Dr. Director's no-frills chair, as sturdy and straight-backed as she is, and search for his next breath. Attached to it is that moment when he stood on the prow of his hovercraft, armed with his Hydro-Pollinator and the ring of petals he was starting to think quite fetching, and he looked at the usurpers without a trace of envy.

The moment where Dr. Drakken rose from the ashes like a cockroach. (It may not be very poetic, but roaches are the species most scientifically likely to survive the apocalypse. Them or rats, and perhaps Drakken would rather be a rat - the ones in GJ's labs, at least, turned out to be smarter and friendlier than expected.)

"Warhok thought Earth was such a weak planet that he brought only his battle-mate with him," Lorbin says. "He did not count on discovering the Great Blue there."

"Gykks?" Drakken garbles. "Are you saying that I - that I'm -" What are those other words and how does anyone ever form them?

"It is highly possible," Lorbin says.

For once that word, _possible_ , does not make Drakken cringe. His ego is alive inside him, alternately screaming and mewling, begging to take this development and iron it onto a banner, mold it into a makeshift-yet-lovely crown.

Those golden fantasies never manage to stay around long, however, before they begin to darken. And they react negatively with his new. . . well, his whole newness, until Drakken is sure he can taste yeast. He tenses his neck and strains - he _will_ be gracious, he _will_ be humble; if it takes forever, he will get this right!

A nervous chatter mechanism is activated automatically. All of his mental energy is centered around the sinister-fanged ego, wrangling it into submission.

"Well, just so you know, I wasn't the one who - you know, blew them up," Drakken reiterates. "That was Kim Possible's sidekick - some kid whose name I can never remember. Shego - that's _my_ sidekick, Shego - she told me the kid suddenly turned blue, had superstrength and karate moves, and his shadow looked like a monkey." Drakken holds up his hands. "Don't ask me. It's a little outside my field. . . "

"We've heard also of the man-child with the blue powers," Lorbin says. He fingers the black strip beneath his left eye. "Another interesting thing about the Great Blue prophecies: in the original language, it is hard to tell whether the pronouns used are singular or plural."

"You mean. . . . we - we - we?" He sounds like the pig in the nursery rhyme, Drakken knows, _wee-wee-wee_ all the way home, but finishing is currently beyond him. The bulk of the news barely fits into his brain. Dizzying pictures, smeared thoughts, and particles of words splay around in a type of messy storyboard.

The only one to be inked in is the knowledge that no, he will never miss villainy.

Drakken falls from the chair onto the ground with nary a hint of pain.

"You and your friend have fulfilled your destiny, Dr. Drakken," Lorbin says from someplace far-off.

 _Destiny_. It isn't a very scientific concept, yet it's hard even for those scientifically inclined to resist the idea that there is a definite purpose behind their existence. That they are here to complete something no one else can. Florence Nightingale was meant to invent nursing, Thomas Jefferson to write the Declaration of Independence. Dr. Drakken to conquer the Earth.

Or so he thought two months, three weeks, and six days ago.

The curiosity-sparking panel of dials and buttons and lights don't even register as Drakken stares down at them. He's seeing something else altogether, something that unspools before him with everything but a voice-over intoning, _Previously in the life of Dr. Drakken_ :

Warmonga's laser gun, aimed directly between his eyes at their first meeting. The spark of evil inside him, the lie, the lair that grew from a box. The dastardly plan that followed, a rock rolled down a hill whose momentum he could start but never stop. Shego limp in Warmonga's arms. The cuts and bruises from being hurled into the air like a field hockey disc. The abduction, the appearance of an alien stranger's barbaric glare five feet above Drakken. The dread that tightened all his organs when Warmonga appeared with her lip curled at the sight of him, smaller than the stranger who turned out Warhok but twice as frightening in the moment. The clear place in his head that opened up, the streets ripped apart, the vines entangling the Lorwardians, the shine of a golden medal. . .

All the damage that came from his evil and all the good that came from the damage. Detritus from the alien attack interwoven with buds of rebirth.

It is hard to accept without a formula, but the truth is already as deep inside him as the Laws of Thermodynamics.

"So - does this mean our planets _aren't_ going to war?" Drakken asks, just for the sake of clarification. He's pretty sure Shego groans from seventeen miles away.

Lorbin chuckles, a sound throatier and more powerful than any engine of Eddy's. "We are not. Thank you, Dr. Drakken."

Drakken's face is stretched too wide for him to answer. When Warmonga first tempted him with the promise of intergalactic superweapons, Drakken had even himself convinced that perhaps he _was_ the Great Blue - he _could_ be the Great Blue, so perhaps it was his destiny to be.

Now that it just might _be_ , he feels nothing swelling, hears nothing cackling. There is only the clean freshness, the kind you experience after a dentist appointment, only spread throughout the entirety of his being.

"No," Drakken says, wobble-voiced. "Thank _you_."

Lorbin's black smudges crinkle. "Good-bye."

He glances both clenched fists off his tattoo and then crosses them at the wrist. Drakken returns it with a signal he remembers seeing on _Mork and Mindy_ once. Lorbin lets out another iron-clad chuckle, and then he ends the transmission and the screen fizzes with static.

Drakken collapses back into the chair and massages the temples he didn't notice were throbbing until this very second. "Oh, that was intense!" he gasps. "Best case scenario, but still intense!"

There's a touch on his sleeve, a strong touch where every drop of perspiration has been chased away. "You must be very relieved," Dr. Director says.

Drakken bobs his head.

Dr. Director's amused expression swims back into his view. "Well, I believe our work here is done for the day, ladies and gentlemen. Feel free to go home and enjoy the rest of your evenings - with your pagers on, of course, just in case I'm wrong."

She appears to be winking. Then again, she always does, with the eye patch and all. . .

At any rate, Drakken decides to take her at her word. He executes another sharp salute and marches from the room with his shoulder pads lying level, a giant grin and a marvelous plan both in the works.

On the way home, Drakken decides, he'll stop and buy himself a great, blue Snocone to eat after dinner. And not one of those watery, flavorless brands, either. No, now that he gets a steady paycheck, he can splurge on the good stuff. Then _after_ dinner, he's going to call Stoppable.

Because this feeling is too big for one person's chest to hold.


	39. The Taking of Smarty Mart

**~Hello once again. This is going to be one of the goofier, more cartoonish fics, as we watch a very young and new-to-villainy Dr. Drakken attempt to menace the populace. Key word being "attempt." He has Shego for a reason. XD**

 **I'm just going to be up-front and say that I haven't been feeling one-hundred-percent lately. Hopefully I will still be able to post regular chapters, but if there's too long a delay, just know that I'm alive and well but struggling with my writing. You guys are great; thanks for the support.**

 **Enjoy!~**

Dr. Drakken, soon-to-be-notorious supervillain, clears his throat and practices again:

"I am Dr. Drakken, notorious mad scientist, and I claim this land for my own!"

That's good. No, better than good - it's scathing. _Mart_ would be a more accurate word than _land_ , but _land_ wins out simply for being that much more dramatic. And if Drakken has learned anything in the last few years, it's that villainy is all about the dramatis - or whatever it's called.

At least his voice doesn't crack anymore. Now he has an entire thunderstorm at his disposal every time he parts his lips.

And at least he's ditched the glasses with lenses as big as pockets, even if his contacts _do_ run sometimes and occasionally bunch up in his eyeballs as though they don't quite fit. Between them and the new bluish bags of sleeplessness on the undersides, his eyes look larger, more intense.

There are only a few things that Drakken still lacks. A lair. Some assistants. And - oh, yes - total domination of the planet.

And what better place could be seized and appropriated for his first lair than a supermarket?

True, it's not the Mount Olympus where Drakken has envisioned living ever since dropping out of college - yet Smarty Mart definitely has its assets. It's spacious and high-ceilinged enough to fit the evil-lair mold, and with a few minor modifications to the lights, it can easily become eerie enough. And, of course, they have all kinds of food, toys, games - even mattresses to sleep on! He'll never want for anything again once he's conquered this place.

Certainly it beats the hotel rooms he stayed in the last couple of weeks. Or the abandoned warehouse where he spent the night, which had no electricity in its outlets and a faucet that only gave three dribbles of water at a time even when you torqued the handle straight toward the ceiling. Someone as brilliant as Drakken could doubtlessly fix it up, but why expend precious energy to create what you can outsource? He remembers hearing something like that in economics class senior year.

This time, he has wits. He has wiles. He has a guaranteed unforgettable entrance in his pocket.

This time, he comes armed with a plan that can't fail - unlike his first one, which cost him a few weeks in jail, a mild sentence offered in exchange for pleading guilty, paying a fine, and returning the Clonitron. It had been dream-crushing, to be sure, for Drakken to hand the machine over, but he couldn't very well make use of it from the pokey, now, could he?

Drakken swats away the hair that has grown longer and shaggier during his incarceration. After almost twenty-three years together, he wishes it didn't still insist on springing into babyish spikes, though at least it doesn't obstruct his vision this way. He swings himself out of the hovercraft and pauses to observe Smarty Mart in all its large glory, sprawled across the parking lot the way a cat lies in a sunbeam.

Pretty soon _he'll_ get to sprawl atop all of it.

Smarty Mart's logo stares down at him from above the entrance. It's a cartoon of a brain, a pleasant pink rather than the actual gray of brains, with a face drawn on, wearing a set of eyeglasses and a graduation cap. Drakken grins. He likes that logo. He will commandeer it as well once Smarty Mart is his. It will stand as a testament to his genius, forever reminding those who once doubted him that Dr. Drakken gets the last laugh.

The automatic double doors swish aside, letting Drakken in. He and the posse used to always chuckle over that, pretending they were opening the doors with Jedi mind tricks, during their voyages here for instant noodles and sticks of deodorant. Pain sticks at him like a stray burr, twisting to remind Drakken that he is a Sith now.

And if today goes as planned - and why shouldn't it? - he may even earn his place among the Darths. Not only will the doors part for him then - _all_ doors - but his ominous theme music will blare from all corners.

Wouldn't that be something to hear, echoing through the dimensions of a building this big?

For a moment, Drakken is frozen in. . . in. . . is _dazzlement_ a word? The floors, walls, and ceilings are medicinal white, aisles stretched so long that the other end must be in Alaska. Sidebars of tiny items are offered up for display in stacks, sunscreen and hairspray and sweets attached to jewelry, candy zirconium. The envy that Drew Lipsky always kept shoved into a resentful compartment somewhere inside gushes open under Dr. Drakken's control, and it towers higher than the shelves.

He _will_ have it all.

Chin jutting extra-far in determination, Drakken reaches into his pocket and pulls out the smoke bomb - blue, his favorite color - that he so carefully tucked away in there this morning, followed by the lighter he stole from the Middleton Institute of Science and Technology's lobby when he passed through it for the final time. He is being driven now by something so thick and fierce that guilt will never overpower it.

The lighter flares to life, a miniature catastrophe in his hands. Drakken takes a moment to revel in its power, power he will not lose again, before he bends down and slips the flame onto the wick of the smoke bomb.

It sizzles briefly, lists to one side - no further movement.

 _Oh, come on!_ Every smoke bomb he practiced with worked. Every. Single. One!

 _You should have brought two,_ Drakken's thoughts crow at him. _The odds that both of them would be duds are much lower. . ._

Drakken brings his hands up to his eyelids. No glass separates them anymore, and he grabs that to remind himself that he is no longer Drew Lipsky, the walking example of Murphy's Law. He is Dr. Drakken, schemer extraordinaire, and he can figure this out.

With his chemistry set still at home, however, Drakken has no way to identify the problem. There's only one thing he can do. He plants his foot in the middle of the bomb and pushes down with all his strength.

It explodes in a puff of smoke that blues the air and probably at least half the alveoli in Drakken's lungs. His bellowing coughs almost drown out the shrill clamor from above.

At first, Drakken thinks it is his own failure, whining in his ears, and discovers he is wrong when the ceiling splits open with a rush of water that plasters his spikes to his forehead and his clothes to his thin band of flesh almost immediately. Smart enough not to glance up at the sprinkler system, Drakken nevertheless sputters and spits as artificial rain streams around his cheeks and infiltrates his collar to chill his chest.

"What in the world is _that_ about?" a woman asks from nearby and far off.

"Nothing to worry about," the man who Drakken assumes is her husband answers. "Looks like someone just dropped a cigarette."

The woman _tsk_ s. "Isn't this a no-smoking establishment?"

The sprinkler system shuts off after - it seems decades, though Drakken's waterproof watch reports it has been less than three minutes. He'll probably take Smarty Mart in another forty-five, Drakken decides. He shakes from head to toe to rid himself of the drench, crying "Gwweegg!" when an insider droplet on his back falls through the waistband of his pants.

It attracts the attention of an orange-vested Smarty Mart greeter. She shuffles her way over to him, which concerns Drakken. She looks older than him - who doesn't? - but not old enough to shuffle.

What she _does_ look like is someone who has been duty for so long already that by now, mid-afternoon, she can scarcely muster the energy to wave. When she says, "May I help you, sir?" her words are flat little pancakes, stuck to the griddle.

This is it. Drakken straightens his posture in his new, enough-room-in-the-shoulders blue lab coat. It looks like an old-fashioned policeman's frock.

Actually, he has no idea what a "frock" is or if policemen ever wore them. Just sounded cool. Good thing most people aren't smart enough to pick up on that. This woman is so sleepy-eyed that she probably wouldn't question it.

"I am Dr. Drakken, soon-to-be-notorious mad scientist!" Drakken thunders. _Wait - I wasn't supposed to say "soon-to-be"!_ "And I claim this land for my own!"

Nothing happens. No one firebombs him from above.

The woman's bored eyes travel up and down Drakken, taking him in - his snowy, sickly face; his beaten-up sneakers; the small thin hands that, come to think of it, he really should shutter behind gloves - before returning to a point somewhere beyond him. For an instant, Drakken almost becomes shy. For an instant, he considers backing down and laughing it off, telling the woman he's just kidding, and picking up some hamburgers to grill tonight. And a grill.

Until it occurs to him that no one else is looking his way. At all.

"Can I help you find something?" she says.

Drakken feels the blood climb to his cheeks. "Neh? Did you hear what I just said?"

"I heard you, and I don't believe -" In the middle of her sentence, she turns to a teen who has just entered, says "Welcome to Smarty Mart," and then turns back to Drakken - "we can help you there."

He prepared for everything. Everything. Monsoons. A falling meteor. Armed guards. Everything.

Everything except the same treatment they'd give someone who came in and requested sugarless fruit.

Drakken pulls the one card that still remains in his arsenal. "I demand to speak to your manager!"

The greeter nods without so much as blinking and begins to edge her way along the narrow streak of linoleum that serves as a horizontal beam at the end of the vertical check-out stations. "I'll talk to him. Don't go away," she says in a voice that means, _I sincerely hope you're gone by the time I get back._

Well, he won't be!

Drakken glances down at his watch and jiggles each foot from side to side, up and down, and back again. His estimate of forty-five minutes is becoming more and more improbable. He might have to bump it up another hour, which feels strangely like admitting premature defeat.

It actually takes another fifteen before the manager can clear his schedule. Drakken is forced to read magazine gossip about celebrities he's never heard of in order to give his brain something to focus on besides the seconds that are melting away like marshmallows in hot chocolate. He could have written an entire dissertation on the dissolution of marshmallows in hot chocolate - well, maybe not _written_ it on paper, but certainly have thought it all up and recited it - by the time the greeter returns and ushers him to the office.

Drakken stops outside the door to talk himself down from a boil - _You're a genius, Drakken! You're the greatest! Someday that greeter will be bragging to everyone she knows that she once had the opportunity to speak to you!_ He's seen Martin Smarty, with his thick shock of brown hair and his jaw like an index card, in the local papers, and he is not a man you can let your guard down around for a moment. Drakken clears any remaining smoke and uncertainty from his throat.

The door swings open, and it isn't Martin Smarty who greets him. It's a thirtyish guy with a scattering of whiskers on his face and a bright orange T-shirt stretched across a broad torso.

"Where's Martin Smarty?" Drakken demands.

The imposter obviously doesn't subscribe to the old adage about no stupid questions; he gives Drakken the kind of squint employed when one doesn't have great faith in another's brainpower. "He's our CEO, not our branch manager," the guy says.

"That's not the question I asked!"

"Well, if you've gotta know, he's currently on a cruise." The man all but rolls his eyes as his fingers fold on the wood in front of him. "So, what is it you need, man? An exchange of some sort?"

Initially, Drakken thinks the man is asking if he'd like to swap lives with Martin Smarty, and he almost says yes. He catches on in the very last nanosecond before making a complete fool of himself and throws his chest forward.

"Actually, no. I'm more interested in a hostile takeover." Drakken's new adult voice, spreading smooth as butter, does him proud.

Manager Man fails to see the slender substance of Drakken's body as a threat. . . although perhaps _failed_ is not the right word, because that involves some effort on his part. "Are you now?" he says, with that flavorless irony that suggests he is talking to someone eight years old at most.

 _Drakken. Not Drew._

Drakken closes his eyes and regroups some oxygen. Okay. Smooth. Maybe he was too smooth. All the evil scientists he examined through reruns of superhero shows speak loudly, lips far apart, suspiciously accenting random words, a trace of madness in the wings.

"I am Dr. Drakken, notorious supervillain" - he didn't say _soon-to-be_ this time! - "and I claim this land as my own," Drakken says for the second time today. He finishes with the cackle he's spent the entire month rehearsing. It should go on the mix tape of his theme music, he decides.

Manager Man looks oddly amused. Is that how a hostage is supposed to react?

"Well, that's a new one," he says.

Drakken grumbles to himself and turns away. He's always thought his evil laugh was rather affecting, actually. Why is no one quaking in terror?

"I have -" what do they call that thing in the gangster movies he caught at the hotel? - "a rap sheet!" Drakken blurts.

The manager doesn't so much as lift a finger from his typewriter. "I'm sure you do," he says.

The doubt in his voice punches Drakken, remarkably similar to the feeling he had last week when the shower nozzle in his hotel room swung back in his face and left him with a black eye. That wasn't a good week.

Drakken casts a narrow look around the room, a look that would force even the clown at a kid's birthday party to shed his smile. Thus far in his short career as a supervillain, he hasn't wanted to erase anyone except the members of his ex-posse. This man, though. . . ohhh, Drakken would gladly scalp him. . . if he knew how. Does HenchCo give classes on that sort of thing?

For an uncertain second, Drakken fumbles in his pocket, searching for his wallet, but of course there is no Villain I.D. badge he can flash. There's only thirty-some dollars in cash and a cheap new credit card in there. Definitely not enough to buy the place.

And he's really got to stop thinking in terms of honest business transactions if he's ever to succeed at this.

The fists Drakken rolls up might not know how to take a swing even if he begged them to. There is, however, one other weapon. Drakken pulls out the lighter and clicks its kindling switch, a tiny pocket of heat beneath his face. He hasn't got a clue what he would do with it; it matters only that he is armed.

Until Manager Man steps in - far too calmly - and plucks the lighter right from Drakken's grasp. His chest only comes up about as high as Drakken's, but it's cradled in muscles that have yet to show up on Drakken's own. "We'll just go ahead and take that," he says. "This is a no-smoking establishment."

He doesn't even regard it as a _weapon_ , refuses to acknowledge that the impoverished frame standing before him hides a heart more fearsome than that of Al Capone himself.

The gall of it paralyzes Drakken for a moment. Manager Man slides the lighter into a drawer, closes it, and folds his hands in front of the typewriter, saying, "Can I do anything else for you?"

Drakken feels his shrug brush his earlobes. What else is a guy supposed to do when he has memorized and perfected his role and then his co-star goes utterly off-script? Never taking his eyes from the manager's, which don't even bother to form a glare, Drakken backs up until he hits the closed door, struggles it open, and exits with even the ends of his hair limp near his collar.

Okay. Drakken breathes deep - nose, mouth, in, out - and shakes the kinks out of his muscles to convince himself he's not tense at all.

Unfortunately, one shoelace snags onto a rack of allergy medication and sends both the pills and Drakken himself tumbling to the ground. His frantic scramble-back-up rips open one packet and sends a thousand capsules skittering across the tiles. So much for 24-hour relief.

Drew Lipsky would turn electric pink and rush across the floor on all fours to salvage as many of the capsules as he could, hysterically try to shove them back into their packet before a store employee appeared to scold him. Dr. Drakken, on the other hand, gives the whole mess an unashamed sneer and walks on to demonstrate his malevolence.

Only right now he doesn't _feel_ much malevolence. What he _feels_ is degradation. Shrunken, sunken, small enough to crawl into one of Smarty Mart's environmentally-friendly canvas bags and be carried out with the groceries.

Boots. That's what he needs, Drakken determines. A pair of good boots that conform to the feet, with no laces to loose themselves and set traps for you.

Clearly he still bears too much resemblance to that wounded college kid. The manager must have seen it, seen _some_ thing that enabled him to resist Drakken, to terrify him even though _Drakken_ was the one with the weapon. And Dr. Drakken was born of that kid who was sick and tired of being scared, overpowered, ignored, bullied. Why can't _he_ be the bully for once?

The next rack - of cloyingly shaped chewable vitamins - he knocks over on purpose.

Drakken shakes his head and schools his face back into the realm of the untouchable. Yes, he is a true genius, maligned and scoffed at and unappreciated in his own time - and yet in the manner of every great mind, he continues to forge onward, unafraid, unscathed.

Well, maybe just a _little_ scathed. Being looked at like he's a flake of dandruff can _hurt_.

Drakken skulks past the carefree aisle of children's toys and around the muggy pet section, where fish _blub-blub_ with their gaping mouths and never-blinking stares, as if mocking the expression Drakken knows he wore on his way out of Manager Man's office.

 _Shrugged_. He _shrugged_. Why did he _shrug_? Why didn't he say something snappy and menacing - "Yeah. Go stick a fork in a toaster" - to establish that evil doesn't cease to exist just because it goes unrecognized?

Finally, Drakken comes to an ankle-burning halt in the bed linens department and sinks down onto a child's mattress. The sheets are printed with those cartoon semitrucks that moonlight as robots - not the type of robots that a naive college student attempts to take to a dance, but the skyscraping variety, big enough for a person to get inside and situate themselves behind the controls of their weaponry and produce lasers whose barrels alone outsize his enemies.

If only there were a couple of those around. Drakken would gladly hop in and raise Doomsday on Smarty Mart - management, greeters, and customers alike.

It's a beautiful darkness, like the photographic moment when a shark leaps from the water next to a boat and bares its fangs, and you know it could devour you in one bite. Drakken just sits there for awhile, experiencing the longing that turns his fingertips to shoots of cacti, imagining Smarty Mart's occupants running from the great and terrible hand of Dr. Drakken, and relishing it as his fear, tacky in his armpits, hardens to something colder and baser.

He heard "great and terrible" in one of those cartoon shows, and he no longer wonders how the two adjectives can coexist.

Drakken hitches the waist of the lab coat and adds _belt_ to his List Of Things He Needs To Invest In. Maybe one with a button in the middle that he can rewire to produce a jetpack when pressed? No doubt _that_ would have spiced up his departure from Manager Man's office.

Manager Man. A scowl broods on Drakken's forehead, below the eyebrows that have finally run together into one furry line. He announces his villain status to the jerk's _face_ , and the jerk doesn't even call security to remove him? Even the smell of gunpowder on Drakken's clothes - although it was admittedly put there by firecrackers and not a gun - didn't brand him a threat.

 _Wait a minute. Wait just a_ minute _!_

Drakken hugs the robot-patterned pillow in glee. This can work to his advantage! No one expects anything from him. No one is monitoring him. He has been dismissed in boredom.

What better time to surreptitiously gather parts for an _actual_ working weapon?

The thought comes not a second too soon. The genius diploma Drakken awarded himself in lieu of an official one was starting to shake loose from its hooks in his mind.

Drakken rubs his palms together and prepares another cackle. Now he just needs to create a diversion. All those greeters in their official vests and smartly-pressed jeans, they must be taken out of the picture.

Not _erased_ , not yet. Just - diverted.

His first impulse, quickly dismissed, is to start jumping up and down on the mattress - he cannot _be_ the diversion if he is attempting to direct attention _away_ from himself. Each successive idea - open a package of Oreos and have a snack right there in the cookie aisle, rip open tissue packs and litter the floor with tissues, take a baseball bat to the most expensive lamp - suffers from the same problem.

Drakken settles one fist on his chin, elbow crooked on his knee to keep it in place. This villain thing is more complicated than he anticipated. He has enough hatred to level three or four cities all by itself, and yet it can't be converted to kinetic hatred if he doesn't know the proper formula.

Perhaps being a villain is something that requires practice. Perhaps no one has the knack for it right away - but perhaps once you develop it, you can never lose it. Like riding a bike.

The jolt of sudden inspiration makes a wonderful, painless alternative to being poked in the backside with a stick. It's certainly just the forward-thrust he needs to transform his hatred-at-rest into hatred-in-motion.

Bikes! Of course! He bolts down the aisle on flying feet, nearly stumbling over them. If Eddy's taught him anything, it's that there's no better way to wreak havoc than with a set of wheels. Objects in motion tend to _stay_ in motion, after all - until they are impeded by something.

Preferably something valuable and/or tricky to clean up.

A thousand masterpiece disaster scenarios parade through Drakken's mind, each outdoing the one before it in their struggle for his favor. They jet-propel Drakken across the floor, back through the pet aisle, back past the home furnishings section with its chairs and its cushioned boxes that sit at the end of chairs. He thinks they might be called _ottomans_ , and that makes him think of the Ottoman Empire and how it shall be nothing compared to the Drakken Empire, and how glad he is that he changed his name, because who would take an overlord whose last name rhymed with "pipsqueak" seriously?

Drakken shoots straight _past_ the bike aisle and must brake in a great squeal of rubber and a stumble-landing that he's thankful no one's around to witness. Thankful _and_ surprised. It's practically another one of science's universal laws: people are never around when you crave attention, but a crowd will always manage to gather during the times you could be mistaken for a fool.

The bike aisle is lined with the usual suspects - squatty tricycles, little-girl bikes with the frou-frou ribbons that will look cool but mess with wind resistance going down a steep hill, and the machine-type bikes whose strong lines make them appear to be futuristic descendents of racehorses. Drakken selects the one with the most destructive capacity showcased in its fat front wheel.

He wheels it _relatively_ noiselessly from the incline of the shelf and trundles it to the end of the aisle. He mounts it, nerves pulsing as it wobbles under him, seemingly disagreeable. His feet bump around for the pedals and then, when they find them, give them a good sharp push. Then another. And another, until Drakken's coasting down the adjacent aisle, right toward a display of. . .

Are those marbles? Drakken grins. _Perfect._

Drakken stands on the pedals to put extra force behind his last push before diving off, ducking and rolling as people did when they jumped from moving vehicles in that same gangster movie. An elbow barks on the floor as he lands, and he skids like a hockey puck back into the bike aisle on his belly. No pain shows up, though, not after a crash shakes some plaster from the ceiling, and a marble rattles across the floor toward him.

 _Yes!_

Not wanting to attract attention, Drakken scrabbles on hands and knees to the next aisle and peeks from behind its steel shelves. He could swear his neck lengthens as it lifts into an arc of triumph. (Isn't that a building, though. . . in France or someplace?)

Sure enough, Drakken hears the walkie-talkie static that signals the approach of a greeter. Followed by a gasp, an exclamation of "What in the world?" and then something else Drakken doesn't hear and isn't sure he would want to. There's probably a reason she said it so quietly.

"The plan is working," Drakken mutters to his own self. The words have the starched feel of a shirt fresh out of the box yet haunt the immediate atmosphere with the promise of more to come.

The first thing on Drakken's weapon-supply list is a battery. The biggest one he can find is right here in the toy aisle, clipped to the front of one of those books with the sound-effect buttons that Drakken always enjoyed as a kid. The Drew in him still clutches with guilt as he rips it from the cover, but there are still three functional copies to give any disappointed child as a free replacement.

Plus, he's evil and doesn't care anymore.

He goes ahead and snags the trigger from a Nerf gun while he's at it.

Next he needs a chassis. _Chassis_ , Eddy once told him, basically means _body_ , and Eddy sometimes used it in creepy contexts that made Drew suspect they were no longer discussing cars or motorcycles. Drakken squirms at the memory as he separates a small box-shaped speaker from the rest of its stereo set. Wires poke joyously from the back, begging to be tinkered with.

Your average folks, your not-quite geniuses, would be stumped by the task of finding a working laser. Not Dr. Drakken. _He_ remembers the tiny home security aisle in the very back of the store and, just as expected, a small laser security system is packaged between padlocks and miniature safes. A little primitive by today's standards, it will do quite nicely nevertheless.

A timer. Electrical tape. Buttons off a remote control. A grapefruit pilfered from the breakfast-food aisle to serve as an emergency battery. He's distracted by a self-similar pattern, children on the back of a cereal box reading the back of a cereal box out into infinity, for a good five minutes, before finally managing to pull his eyes away as though dragging them out of a magnetic field.

Finally, it comes down to the tools. Screws, a screwdriver, jump-start cables, a wrench, a welder, the works. Drakken strolls into the hardware department with complete confidence - well, as much confidence as he can considering the hammer-heads themselves seem to curl up in disgust when he walks by. Ghosts of male laughter and roughhousing are imprinted in the items that hang lopsidedly, in the scuff marks put there by much larger feet.

Drakken grabs what he needs and beats a path out of there.

He finds the nearest unoccupied bathroom, checks three times to make sure its stick figure isn't wearing a skirt, and locks himself and his inventory in the _handicapped_ stall, because it seems the acceptably unacceptable thing to do. It must be hours that he works. Long enough, anyway, to lash into the lower quarter of his back, which pains so much more easily ever since Bebe wrecked it, herself, _and_ Drew Lipsky's life in one fell swoop.

(Whatever a "fell swoop" is.)

When at last the weapon is completed, it will not win any beauty contests - a point that Drakken declares moot since he's never seen such a contest for machinery, not even at the Middleton Institute for Science and Technology. Its sides have no symmetry, the barrel crooks as though old, and the whole thing sags somewhat in the middle under the weight of the master screw holding it together.

But to Drakken, it's a glorious sight. He gives it a hug, walks out of the restroom on legs more solid than they've felt since he first entered Smarty Mart, and waits.

And waits. And waits. And waits, until he can no longer focus and has dropped to the floor, tapping the toes of his sneakers together, and that's when Drakken remembers the first part of the new law he coined - no one comes as long as the attention is wanted.

Drakken re-stands and pecks at his brow to think. _I'll have to lure them here myself!_

Yelling, "Hey, Mr. Manager!" nets him no more than a five-second, concerned glance from a woman with a cart overflowing with groceries. An evil laugh is lost in the limitless aisles. Sweat begins to form.

 _I think I might be really bad at this._

 _Nonsense!_ Drakken assures himself. _You've just never done it before. Everyone needs to start somewhere._

Ugh, but how he wishes some veteran villain were next to him, feeding him tips.

Drakken's eyes refuse to settle, zigzagging up each wall all the way to the ceiling and back down again. He sees a water fountain, a CAUTION - WET FLOOR sign, a coupon someone dropped for half-off deli meat, a fire alarm, and six cobwebs.

A fire alarm!

Still clutching his precious machine in one hand, Drakken rushes over to the fire alarm and rests his damp palms on its compact red handle. You know, he's always wanted to try this, ever since he was a little kid. Only he was always too afraid to break the rules. The rules he swallowed every morning along with his cod liver oil tablets.

Drakken inhales and holds the naughty bliss inside for a moment. Both hands yank down, and a white scream streaks its way across the building. Drakken claps his hands over his ears, grinning villainously even through the sonic outburst that bangs at his head.

Maybe the _naturals_ don't need anyone's tips.

Anticipation crackles like spontaneous electrical currents. Drakken rises to a delicious boom, testing out the grief he plans to give Mr. Smarty-Pants Manager when the man finally shows up.

"So good of you to come, Mr. Manager." _Ooh, yes, that's good! Show that he's so far beneath you didn't even bother to learn his name._ "I'm a generous man, you see, and I'm giving you one last chance. Hand over control of Smarty Mart to me, or I'll" - he hoists the laser to his shoulder and drags a finger down the barrel - "pew-pew. And I would presume this is _also_ a non-pew-pewing establishment!"

That's when the scream of the alarm is crunched beneath another noise, a rumbling, the kind that can jar your teeth right from your jaw. It sounds like a locomotive. Except locomotives don't bubble. . . do they?

Drakken glances upward and sees exactly what he was hoping he wouldn't.

An enormous wall of water descends on him like Armageddon itself. And here he is, holding a laser in one hand.

The only clarity in Drakken's head is a montage of cartoon characters, dropping their electric razors into the bathtubs with them and being shocked down to skeletons. The laser - he needs to get rid of it. But how? Panic has made a sieve of his brain and locked his carpal down tight, and why can he remember the name of the bone in his wrist but not how to operate it?

Adrenaline is _supposed_ to be a fight-or-flight response. There's no room in survivalism for a third alternative that roots you to one spot while giving you heart palpitations.

It is this injustice, this fury, that finally frees Drakken's left arm from premature rigor mortis. He winds up and heaves the laser diagonally away from the water. Its trajectory is beautiful as it clears the top shelves and sails despairingly out of sight.

But there's no time to mourn. Five seconds later, the water strikes Dr. Drakken, who was never the strongest swimmer, towing him under, bumping his hairline, his knees, his elbows against the ground on its surge for parts unknown. Drakken holds his nose, his breath, although he can't work his eyelids shut and catches strobe-light glimpses of concerned faces, orange vests, and tubes of sunscreen. It's exactly the same as being tipped upside-down on a water slide, endless water shoving you in every direction except up.

His fingers struggle for the floor yet are unable to latch on until it's no longer linoleum he's being swept over but gritty concrete. The water pressure releases its grip, spurting a few more waves over Drakken's limp form and then finally dwindling out into tame streams across the blacktop.

Outside. He's outside. Drakken lies there for a moment, cockeyed and spluttering in the open, chlorine-scented air and the sunshine. A few of the marbles he used for distractions swirl in the shallows beside him, cracking into each other like hailstones. Smarty Mart's brain-logo peers down at him, wearing its graduation cap as an accusation - _You'd have your degree by now if you hadn't dropped out._

As far as Drakken can tell, he has three options:

1\. He can storm back into Smarty Mart and pick up where he left off.

2\. He can call it a day and retreat back to the warehouse.

3\. He can run home to Mother.

Option One sounds the most appealing. . . in the thirty seconds before Drakken realizes that he has forfeited his laser, his labor of love (laser of love?). It is probably even now being discovered, scoffed at, and disassembled without ceremony, the poor short-lived weapon. With only the thirty swampen dollars in his wallet to his name, Drakken figures it might be best to stay out of those trenches for the time being. He really ought to think about hiring a henchman army. Although, at this point, Drakken would settle for _one_ single, solitary supporter.

Option Three is a joke, if one that's not humorous in the slightest. Logically speaking, this leaves Drakken with Option Two, loath as he is to admit defeat.

His chemistry professor freshman year told the class that a good chemist learns from his mistakes. He cleans up the mess of a botched experiment, and then he tests every single variable until he can pinpoint where genius went wrong.

Drakken gives his legs some time to congeal before trusting them with his weight. Standing up, he shakes himself off, for all the good it does. His clothes, which were just now beginning to dry, have been rudely reintroduced to water and plastered to every starved-looking rib. So that was Smarty Mart's automated response to the fire alarm, huh? _Well, that's. . . that's. . ._

 _. . . pretty awesome, actually._ Drakken finds himself smiling despite the burdens of each soggy sleeve. _My, what an astonishing feat of hydraulics! Why, when I get my own lair, I'm absolutely adding that to the security system - the Sadistic Security System, name copyright Dr. Drakken. . ._

When he gets his own lair. Drakken prods at the thought. It means that this building here won't be it.

That has nothing to do with being bested and _everything_ to do with him realizing that he's in the market for something darker and more robust. Smarty Mart's ceilings are too workmanlike, Drakken decides, their height for practicality rather than drama. And any one of the many glass panels could give any citizen of Middleton - his mother, even! - a clear view of what the proprietor of the building is doing at any time.

No, a supervillain should live someplace stark, lonely, and unlovely, custom-made to keep out interlopers. The warehouse will suffice on those fronts for now once Drakken rewires it.

He can do better, though. Better than that dump and _certainly_ better than this suburban chain store. _See, your problem is you've been thinking too small,_ Drakken scolds himself as he executes a turn on one dripping rubber heel and leaves Smarty Mart in his dust.

Metaphorical dust. Literal puddles.

Yes, somewhere out there is land that no one has claimed yet, property that has not been smeared with another man's (or woman's) fingerprints already. It waits for Drakken out there, the way lovestruck teenagers wait for soul mates, dreaming of the day when he will discover it and carve it up into his own image.

Maybe some nice gloomy deserted island or something. . .

The possibilities are fireworks in Drakken's mind, and he skips, even with twenty pounds of soggy clothes clinging to his skin, the rest of the distance to the hovercraft. Once there, he throws his arms wide and begins a three-sixty, catching himself only as the triumphant chirp is about to launch from his lips. He stops, wrinkles his nose at himself, and drops into the driver's seat.

Sheesh, he's going to have to get better at this.


	40. Relapse

**~Hello again, everyone!**

 **This chapter was born out of a nagging feeling that I might have made Drakken a little _too_ noble in "Chosen." It's also what I would love to see them do with Drakken should _KP_ ever get a continuation. Hey, a Purplegirl can dream, can't she?~ **

Paint is what Dr. Drakken sees when he thinks of reformation.

Oh, certainly, the concept triggers other images, too - golden medals, tidal waves of applause, a world scalloped by flowers. Even the aliens, though Drakken tries not to let his thoughts linger too long on them.

But whenever Drakken thinks of _himself_ post-reformation, he imagines the gloss of a fresh coat of paint on a long-forsaken wall, a wall that had begun to embrace its own ugliness (if walls were conscious beings that could make decisions). There's the unexpectedness whenever you walk past it and are reminded anew of its metamorphosis and the sudden delight it spurs. This coat is somewhat sloppy - perhaps applied by an enthusiastic mad scientist who hasn't quite mastered the art of the roller brush - but all that matters is how fresh and shiny it feels.

Still, paint can chip. Drakken has seen that in the green benches scattered around Middleton City Park, and deep down it's his own greatest fear, if not the one that surfaces most often. In fact, it tends to sink to the bottom because it is the heaviest one - heavier than spiders, alien probes, or even the wrath of Shego.

At Global Justice, whenever he snaps a solar panel into place or stabilizes a temperamental mixture of chemicals, Drakken will burst into a maniacal laugh before he can stop himself. Exactly half of the agents turn to stare at him, and exactly half of them do quick look-aways, and Drakken is grateful that leaves exactly no one to wrestle him onto the floor and apply the wrist restraints. Panic attacks are still frequent when he thinks of prison.

Drakken will flash them his biggest, toothiest smile, a natural byproduct of the flushed cheeks, the bunchy under-eye skin, and the feel of cork jammed into his throat. He'll chuckle (wondering why, oh why he couldn't produce such a harmless noise in the first place) and say, "Whoops. Sorry. Force of habit." His apology will be received with sympathy.

The other day he got stuck behind one of those Express Lane charlatans at Smarty Mart. As item after item was rung up, Drakken spent a good minute actively searching through his pockets for some sort of weapon before he realized what he was doing and bit into the side of his cheek.

Worst of all was last night, when he called that. . . kid. . . with the strangely forgettable name. . . .to tell him the news that they might have _both_ been the Great Blue. Drakken though he would enjoy that; his chest was about to burst from holding it in. Yet as soon as the announcement was made, the words were flattened, minimized, and absorbed into the phone receiver, and Drakken wished he could reel them back in. The fireworks show inside him that he thought he would be happy to share vanished. Something ponderous took its place, and Drakken knew it well enough to recognize it when it did.

Selfishness. And that was supposed to be _gone_ now!

Drakken had gone to bed with that same old itch in his chest.

Now he opens his eyes to greet the day and is immediately hit with the niggling sensation that something is just somehow _wrong_. Can tell even as he stretches the kinks from his back and the weird cramps from his legs and smacks the morning paste from his lips. As though there's somehow too much carbon dioxide in the air or someone has left the TV on all night with the volume at one decibel.

Drakken groggily ponders that as he staggers into the bathroom to insert his contacts and wipe some stickiness from his hands. His suspicions wake up before the rest of him when he meets his reflection to find his eyebrow huddled low over his eyes like a vulture perched on a branch. It hasn't hunkered down in quite that fashion for. . .

Two months, three weeks, and six days.

Drakken gulps.

Right off he pads his hands across his body, up and down, side-to-side, to make certain he has no more and no less body than he did when he crawled into bed. Hey, when one has been exposed to as many chemical spills and semi-radioactive explosions as Drakken has, it is a necessary precaution.

Everything measures up there, so Drakken leans in to check his face. Nothing there except pillow lines on his right cheek and a single petal that blooms from the crown of his head like a quail's feather.

He gulps again, testing the density of his throat. No swelling. No razor-blade-type pain. Yet there's something in the very back of it, lurking behind his windpipe, something strangling the usual promise of a new day.

Drakken puts a hand to his chest. It isn't itchy anymore. Instead, it aches, feeling incomplete without the medal. Drakken _could_ rush back to his room and don it, but he hesitates to finger its gold in this moment of imperfection.

 _Hydrogen, helium, lithium. . ._ Drakken recites to himself as he stalks toward the living room.

The unchanging Periodic Table is clunked right out of his head when he collides with something large and metal.

That alone is a warning sign. He doesn't _own_ anything that large or that metallic anymore. Not unless someone donated a new piece of furniture in the middle of the night. They'd have had to break in to do it, but many of Drakken's friends are skilled at infiltration.

Drakken rubs at the sore spot on his scalp and squints at the large, metal, luminous thing for several seconds before it will lie still in his mind. When it does, his fingers freeze, and he feels the hair around them stand on end.

It isn't furniture. No piece of furniture is that irregularly shaped. And not even those fancy-pants massage recliners that Drakken doesn't have the bucks to buy feature that many dials and buttons and knobs, all in warning-light red. And unless it's straight from HenchCo, there'd be no reason for its front end to be composed of a green-yellow slab making a violent reach for the ceiling while two sinuous, wide-spaced cables wend their way around its sides and flare into an opening that all but screams, _Praise me!_

And it _isn't_ HenchCo. Anything Jack Hench touches is precise and corporate-pedestrian. This machine has a certain lovable quirkiness that could only have sprung from -

Dr. Drakken himself.

 _Oh. Snap._

The cramped-up legs, as if he'd spent the whole night walking. The sticky hands he had to wash immediately upon waking up. The heavy-browed scowl.

He made it in his sleep.

Drakken rests a hand against the back of his neck, where goose bumps are tangible even through his glove. His rib cage expands and contracts with hasty breaths, his gut rushing inward until it can't retreat any further. He's afraid to move toward the machine, but something steers him that direction anyway, even as he mutters, "No. No. No. Please no."

The machine's slab has a crease down its middle. It opens up, probably to release the orb that camps out in the center like the nucleus of a cell. Its back end appears to have been crafted from a plastic lawn chair and a keyboard with the gray keys of the '90s computers. Someone has importantly scrawled a name into the panel above it.

"Thermo-Bomb," Drakken reads out loud.

Of _course_. He saw it on one of those many superhero cartoons he used to watch as an insomniac newbie villain. A bomb that is activated once its environment reaches a specific temperature. Flawless if you were planning to invade a desert or an Antarctic research station. Oooh, why didn't _he_ think of that?

No. Wait. He did.

He did, and his heaviest fear is screaming to him. Not an audible voice, not the kind heard by people madder than your average mad scientist. More like the screech of amplified feedback from a microphone.

 _You can do it. You can be the best. . . the strongest. . . the most powerful. . ._

Drakken's eyes bunch to mere slits. The clear, serene place is in his head is negligible. He raises his hands, rips the petal out with surprising savagery, and is about to crumple it when reality beans him in the skull.

 _I thought I didn't miss being a supervillain?!_

He doesn't. He _doesn't_ , and he knows that. But it still has a history with him, is still casting out the line in a spot where the fish have been known to bite.

Drakken is almost certain he feels a Diablo's claw close around his waist.

"No!" Drakken says again, this time at the top of his lungs, the sound like the popping of a balloon. "No, no, no. I'm not - I'm not evil anymore! Kim Possible. . . she believed in me. And she's never been wrong yet, has she?"

 _Kim Possible._

Drakken tears through the house until he finds his cell phone, upside-down and tented open as if it is doing push-ups on the kitchen table. His fingers go Jell-O-y with relief when he spots it, which doesn't deter them from scrolling hysterically through his contacts.

 _Kim Possible, Kim Possible. . ._

It looks much nicer without the barfing emoticon in his e-mail contacts list.

Drakken can't keep his eyes off the Thermo-Bomb between rings. So large, luscious, and larcenous. So potent. So capable of blowing the paint job to shreds and then searing the bench so that there's nothing left of it. He can breathe, but only in short, sharp punches to his chest, as though some kind citizen is giving him CPR, and he can feel his sanity loosening.

 _Rrring_ \- how did this happen? He hasn't even dressed for the day, and already he's in danger of destroying the life that he has come to treasure every bit as much as his most valuable possession.

 _Rrring_ \- it would be _more_ than his most valuable possession, except said possession is the medal, which symbolizes his new life. The medal is valuable both in the sense that it would be worth a lot of money should he ever sell it and in the sense that he would never consider doing so.

 _Rrring_ \- that clear place in his head. The one that told him it was over, it was behind him, that the outdated Evil app was incompatible with Dr. Drakken Version 2.0. . . did it lie?

The phone clicks, and Drakken reasserts his grip on reality.

"Hi, this is Kim." The voice on the other end is groggy, something Drakken has never heard from Kim Possible before, even when they stayed up twenty-four-plus whole hours to take down an extraterrestrial invasion. The sound of her is so small, so young, that Drakken has to take a moment to remember that she is, indeed. . . all that.

"Kim Possible!" Drakken bursts out. "You've got to help me! I've fallen off the chuck wagon!"

There is a pause, also rare among the Possibles.

". . . Drakken?" Kim finally says. There is only the thinnest measure of wariness.

"Present," Drakken says.

"All right." There's a squeaky sound that must be her suppressing a yawn. "What's the sitch?"

Incredible. Those three little words that were once the bane of his existence are now steadying some of the full-body quakes. "I built a doom ray," Drakken manages to say. "Accidentally. In my sleep. And now it's standing there in my living room, and I really want to use it - it's so amazing - it's _wicked_ , as you teenagers are so apt to say - only that's the whole point is that it's _wicked_! In both senses. I'm sorry. Is this a bad time?"

"No, no, it's fine," Kim Possible says. "I was just snoozing a little after classes let out."

"Oh. Right. College. What time is it in Paris anyway?" Drakken looks out his own window. The sun has barely ascended from the horizon, and yet his world is quickly darkening.

"Uh, it's about 3:30, but how about we get back to the important part?" Kim Possible says. "The part where you built a doom ray in your sleep?"

"Right. Of course. Well, I built a doom ray in my sleep."

"What kind?" she says.

"A Thermo-Bomb." Drakken tries to snuff out the pride in his voice, but it will not go quietly. "Temperature-controlled miniature warhead."

"Got it. And you say you want to use it?"

Drakken glances at the Thermo-Bomb yet again to make sure it has not been set, especially to a cold temperature, because in the last five minutes it's surely dropped twenty degrees in here. "Yes. I do."

"Okay. Code name yikes." Something rustles and settles as, Drakken imagines, she sits down and bends her limbs in businesslike folds. "Do you want to use it because it's really cool or because you're going back to being a villain?"

"I - I - the first one. I think. I hope."

"Same here," Kim Possible says. Drakken recognizes the silky swish of her head-tilt. "Drakken, do you have a prob with this whole reformation thing? I mean, the last time we talked, it seemed like you were doing super-well."

It is an odd moment to notice that she is not irritated with him. Not in the slightest.

"I _am_ ," Drakken says. "I have a job now. I'm receiving a regular paycheck. Shego lives nearby. People like me! I'm remembering to eat now! And sleep!"

"And you know what? I'm actually mega-happy for you," Kim Possible says. "But are there ever times when you miss being a villain?"

Drakken's brain turns into an echo chamber, volleying the question back and forth between hemispheres. "No," he says, bottom lip thrusting even farther forward than usual. "I don't. I mean, what's to miss? It's just - it's just - I don't _know_!"

"Park the drama for a sec, okay? We've been studying addictions this last week in Psychology, and it's pretty neat stuff. It turns out there are some drugs that are physically addicting - like your body gets royally junked up when you try to go off them. But some of them - and some habits - are _psychologically_ addicting. You stop them, and you don't _miss_ them as much as you just don't know what to do without them."

It is Drakken's turn to be silent, something virtually unheard of, as he knocks some more air into his lungs.

"I mean, you'd been a supervillain since you. . . since you dropped out of college, right?" Kim Possible continues.

"Yes. Since I was nineteen."

The pause is twofold this time, a mutual realization that this is only a year older than Kim Possible is now.

"Ouch," she says. "So - yeah, it'd only be natural that you'd have trouble coming off it."

Drakken drops into a chair and taps one finger against the burnt-umber tabletop with the shadows of _literal_ burns. (A couple of his experiments with kitchen appliances got away from him.) "When you get right down it - I don't know how to be a good guy!" he says.

"Really?" Kim Possible's tone has gone flat, and she flicks it at him as though it's a mosquito she wants to be rid of.

Something aches behind Drakken's eyes. "Really."

"So you're telling me that the guy who risked his life to save Ron from a polar bear, the guy who bashed in the wall of Avarius's lair to help Shego, the guy who totally beat back an alien race and _never_ turned it into a power coup. . . you're saying that man doesn't know how to be a good guy?"

The words are warm, and Drakken might relax into them - except there's still a deadly beautiful machine in his peripheral vision.

"But the Thermo-Bomb! I need to dismantle it, and I haven't been able to bring myself to do it yet!" Drakken lets his unoccupied arm flop to the tabletop, and how does it quiver so while remaining stiff as a pretzel stick? "This isn't how a good guy would respond to this situation!"

"It's not how the old Drakken would respond, either."

Some of the stiffness forfeits Drakken's limbs, leaving his bunny slippers to twitch and bat at empty space. "You mean. . . the old Drakken wouldn't have picked up the phone and called you?" he says.

"Oh, sure he would have." Drakken can picture the sly, know-it-all grin. "But only to gloat to me."

"Grregk," Drakken mumbles. It is some thorny comfort that the world's most confident teenager has changed not a whit.

Drakken peeks back at the Thermo-Bomb, secretly hoping it will be as accident-prone as all of his other Doomsday devices and have disassembled itself while his back was turned. It hasn't - it's still there, and the sight of its dense gray metal glistening in the morning sun puts a thrill in his stomach like a swish of kerosine.

And Drakken suddenly worries that _he_ may not have changed, either. Not a whit, a bit, or any other type of "it."

"Drakken, it's all right. Calm down." Kim Possible must hear the heaving little gasps he's spiraling down into.

"I _can't_!" Drakken snaps the words, rushes them into each other. They feel flammable, and that, too, is entirely too familiar, sauntering casually in as if it has never been evicted at all. "My entire paint job is at stake here!"

The line stills for an instant before Kim Possible says, "Okay? New one for me."

"It's a metalie - a symaphor - a figure of speech!" Hating his snarl, Drakken makes a valiant effort to separate his teeth. "When the UN pardoned me, my heinous deeds against humanity were painted over. Now the paint's chipping, and it could destroy me!"

"So not," Kim Possible says. It is the vocal equivalent of a good-natured rib-nudge. "You've _got_ this, Drakken."

Drakken's ponytail is revived in mid-wilt. Kim Possible still believes in him. And really, _has_ the kid been wrong yet? About anything? In her life? It was always one of the most insufferable things about her.

"I just don't know if I'm strong enough to take it apart," Drakken says. "And I don't mean that I'm not _brawny_ enough, because last I checked I could bench-press - "

"Know what you mean, Drakken." Kim Possible is gracious enough to interrupt him then, before he has to decide on a number - would seventy-five pounds be sufficiently impressive? "It'll be fine. We'll talk through it," she says, in the offhanded manner of one whose speech capacity has never been disloyal. "So tell me - what made you decide to go legit in the first place?"

After all these years - all these years where Kim Possible raised her finger and erased his carefully planned monologues as though they were unwanted answering-machine messages - she has asked for a window into his mind. A lump of honesty rises in Drakken's throat. The answers aren't neat, but they are there.

"Many things!" Drakken says. "Saving the world was my first success, and it felt _tremendous_! They gave me a medal, and people applauded me and called me a genius! Recognized my talent! Accepted me. And - and - I saw someone else achieve world domination." He makes a fist around the chair knob. "And I saw how ugly it was."

"Sounds about right," Kim Possible says. "So tell me - say you went back to being a villain. Say you took over the world. What would it get you that don't have right now?"

Drakken has to take several moments to subjugate his voice. The one he normally uses for handling this word is too much like his Thinking Chair: it has his imprint on it, and should he sink down into it again, it will fold back around him as though they have never been apart. He looks down at the pinstripes on his jammies, riding back and forth with each breath, and then says with tightrope-walking-while-mixing-chemicals deliberation, "Power."

Kim Possible's response - "Bingo" - does not seem surprised. "Is that something that's still, you know, temping to you?" she asks.

"No!" Drakken yelps, only to follow it up with, "Yes. Maybe. I don't know."

Kim Possible does expel a sigh then, and Drakken could swear it sends a breeze across his eardrum. "Sorry, but 'all of the above' isn't a choice."

Odd letter combinations leap from Drakken's mouth - the one organ he can still move. The remainder of him feels as stony as poor old Monkey Fist. Yuck.

Actually, that may be just what Drakken needed to picture to whittle down a feasible answer.

"Sort of. I mean, it still sounds mighty nice. . . and nicely mighty!" Drakken says, words colliding again on their dash out. "But I think - I think what I really always wanted was the power to make everyone respect me _or else_! And now that people already respect me and admire me on their own - and it's so much better - it just doesn't have a lot to offer me anymore."

"So that's something you'd be willing to give up in exchange for being successful and well-liked?" Kim Possible says. Drakken suspects she has pencil and paper at the ready by now.

It doesn't take long to double-check that. His heart is hammering so hard it's blown all its doors wide open. "Yes," Drakken says. "It is." He levels his shoulders, girds his chin. "At the very least, I wouldn't be willing to do the inverse. You know - have they gotten to inversion yet in your college education?"

"Um, try about eighth grade math," Kim Possible says. "But - seriously, when you look at it that way, you don't have any reason to go back to being a villain, do you?"

It's as if someone has laid the timestream flat and gone after it with a rolling pin, lengthening the moment so that the tendrils reach for eternity. "No. I suppose I don't," Drakken hears himself say a century or two later.

His knees wobble like he's just made his first successful trek around the living room on toddler legs.

"Spankin'." Kim Possible's voice, for all intents and purposes, high-fives him. "I just wish I could figure out what pulled your little must-build-Doomsday-devices trigger after so long - in your _sleep_ , espesh!"

The teenage slang tickles at Drakken's facial nerves, yet it's a completely different part of that sentence that sets off the alarms in his brain. "Trigger?" he repeats. "My shrink says that _all the time_! We've figured out Frugal Lucre is one of my triggers. Also fast-food joints. Also dark, closed-in spaces. Also -"

He must not be Kim Possible's Psychology midterm project after all, because she cuts in before even _she_ could have written that all down. "Point taken," she says. "Any idea what might have been the trigger last night?"

"No." Drakken slouches, backbone rounding, against the chair. "Yesterday was a really good day. I got to answer an interplanetary transmission. Someone from Lorwardia _thanked_ me for handing defeat to their rulers. And I found out I may have been the Great Blue, after all! Well, _one_ of the Great Blues. . ."

Drakken's lips work at nothing for a good thirty seconds. Though his brain is whirring like a copy machine, all the ink is smeared, illegible.

"Still there, Drakken?" Kim Possible says.

"Yes." Drakken stands, nibbling a gloved finger in thought. "I - err - gnnk - I think I may have stumbled upon my trigger."

"Great. What is it?"

"Your boyfriend," Drakken says with very little saliva to back him up.

This silence falls heavier and pricklier than any of the preceding ones.

"Wait - you're blaming this on _Ron_?" Kim Possible says. Actually, Drakken has to turn around to confirm that the Thermo-Bomb hasn't learned to speak, because her voice would perfectly suit a dormant death ray.

"Ron! That's his name!" Drakken cries, and then juggles one hand back and forth through the air. "No, no! I'm not blaming. I'm just. . ." He reaches deep into the well of his vocabulary and comes back with a handful of dirt. "Well, I can't think of the word, but if you'll only hear me out, I think you'll understand!"

"All right. Spill." Now Kim Possible's voice _is_ that stretched-skinny tightrope on which Drakken is barely managing to balance with a Bunson burner in each hand.

He might just have a net under him, though. Kim Possible would never have _dreamed_ (dreamt?) of hearing out the old Drakken.

Drakken traces one stripe all the way down the front of his jammies and blurts, "You know, of course, that last night it was revealed to me that the Lorwardian prophecy could have been referencing both Ron _and_ I. That we both had some kind of magical destiny. And as ridiculous as all that seems, it was a wonderful feeling. It was such a good feeling that I called up Ron and passed that information along to him."

"Yeah, he called me right after he got off the phone with you," Kim Possible says. "That did so much for his self-esteem, Drakken."

Drakken squirms. "Self-esteem? Is another word for 'ego'? Well, two words? Or - are hyphenated words counted as one word?"

"No," Kim Possible says. "To the ego thing. An ego is like a freakish mutant version of self-esteem."

The message is harsh, even delivered at her usual perky pitch, and yet Drakken has no grounds to mount a counterattack even if he wanted to. He can only roll on through the words, through the fender-benders piling up among them. "See, that was the thing, though! _After_ I told Ron the news, it didn't feel good anymore. It felt awful. And my ego - my stupid ego started saying, 'What are you thinking? This was the first time in your life you've succeeded at anything! This was _your_ moment in the sun! Yours alone! Now you have to divide it among the two of you! It was only'" - he hears a noise of impatience on the other end and quickly adds, "Etc."

"Uh-oh. There's your trigger, then." Kim Possible's head is doubtlessly cocked to the side like some all-too-wise, all-too-calm bird. "You just did a number on your OWN ego. And when your ego takes a hit -"

"- it builds Doomsday devices," Drakken finishes for her, sinking back into the chair. He feels uncomfortable, ripped open, the way he did when those hideous magnetic hooves stole his belt, turning the spotlight on Drakken's knobby knees and his polka-dotted boxer shorts. "It's so ingrained in me."

"No, Drakken, it's not." Kim Possible speaks with a downgraded version of the sternness she used to defend her beau. "It's something you learned. And now you're unlearning it."

"How can you be so su -"

"Hello? Psychology class? I know you took one at some point. Instinct vs. learned behavior? Something you were that bad at _couldn't_ be instinct," Kim Possible says.

Drakken waits and waits and waits for his body to bristle, but only one hair at the very base of his neck categorizes it as an insult.

"You just made a majorly hard discovery," Kim Possible continues. "Doing something good doesn't always feel good."

"It _doesn't_?" Drakken says. Good has been such an infrequent visitor to his spirit over the last two decades, it was nothing more than a stranger's silhouette in the doorway when it showed up on the night of the alien invasion.

"No. Like when I was thirteen and I told my parents that, yeah, it was the twins who broke Nana's glass pitcher, but they were only able to do it because I was gabbing on the phone - with a _boy_ \- when I was supposed to be watching them." Kim Possible sucks in a rough breath. "It does NOT feel good to get grounded and then wave good-bye to your allowance until you've paid back a third of the cost. But if I hadn't 'fessed up, I'd still be carrying the guilt around."

Drakken sniffs, but before he can open his mouth to say, _As if_ you _know the first thing about guilt_ , Kim Possible answers him as though his brainwaves are being piped into her cell phone and translated across the screen. "And, yikes, Drakken, you've already got enough guilt to last you a lifetime. You get what I'm saying?"

Drakken snaps his mouth closed and sends the words back down the shunt into the reject pile. It might have been rude to say them anyway, he hypothesizes as he nods instead.

Kim Possible giggles, a surprisingly delicate sound, one Drakken would not have imagined could be found inside the girl who sassed him from their first encounter and can kick hard enough that you see not only stars but all sixty-some of Saturn's moons in orbit. "Okay, I hear your head moving, but is it side-to-side or up and down?"

The sudden heat in Drakken's cheeks prompts another double-check of the Thermo-Bomb's slumber. Sunlight leaps from its surface and burns Drakken's corneas until he has to look away. "Up and down," he says. "You were saying - the right thing?"

"Ron says it majorly tanks sometimes," Kim Possible says. A smile is hiking its way across her voice. "But I've noticed that the more you do it, the better you feel about yourself in the long run. Promise."

 _Promise._

It comes with hand outstretched, and Drakken feels it cinch his heart.

"And if nothing else, it keeps you out of jail, right?" Kim Possible says.

The truth of that strikes Drakken right between the various traumas threatening to awaken in his mind. He rises out of the chair, benumbed foot scrabbling for the floor, spine creaking like that of an old book being opened for the first time all year. "Then I'll do it, Kim Possible," he says, and the boom makes a grand re-entrance. "I'll disassemble it."

"Is there any way you could use it for, you know, good stuff?" Kim Possible asks.

Drakken shakes his head - side-to-side this time. "No. It's a bomb. It's indiscriminate."

"Then go for it!" Drakken can almost see Kim Possible striking some sort of cheerleader pose. (However those look these days.) "Drakken - we're rooting for you."

The walls of Drakken's throat slide in toward each other, as if in imitation of a crush-you-to-death type of trap - a thought Drakken flicks away immediately. A small, meek "thank you" struggles through.

"Call me back if you have trouble with it," Kim Possible says. There's not a single sleepy molecule in her voice anymore. "Any trouble at all. I mean it."

"You can count on it." Drakken cracks his knuckles, one at a time, just for the joy of hearing their discordant pops. "Farewell, Kim Possible. Oh, gosh, I meant - you know, goodbye. TTYL, as you young folk say. Ciao. Not in the manner where I'm trying to -"

"'Bye, Drakken. Good luck," Kim Possible says. There is a blooping sound on the other end and Drakken flips his own phone shut so it doesn't have a chance to beep lonesomely as it searches for connection. He would rather stand there in the eardrum-ringing silence and replay Kim Possible's stunning lack of enmity.

He turns, one-hundred-eighty degrees, hands to his hips, mimicking a gunslinger in one of those Old West movies where no one else ever gets pantsed, hero or villain. The Thermo-Bomb stands, challenging, in front of the window, snatching the light and throwing it in ten different directions. It is a beautiful monster, much like those gorgeously CGIed monsters in the sci-fi movie he and Shego saw last week. But is is a monster nonetheless.

Drakken dismantles it as fast as he can, to put it out of its misery.

As he returns each part, now rendered benign, to its rightful place in his lab several hours later, he doesn't quite feel triumphant. There is no urge to throw his fists in the air and scream, "Yee-haw!" in the manner befitting a hero of the Old West. Yet the sadness inside his head is somehow bright and glossy, stainless. It barely weighs a thing, descending in feathery brushstrokes until he drips with it.

Paint _can_ chip away; you have to keep applying new coats.

Drakken pulls his phone back out and selects Shego's number before evening has even rolled around. While the phone rings for the second endless time today, the entire story trumpets fanfare in his brain, rearranging itself, searching for just the right instrument to lead the parade and which will end it on a high note - well, not high as in High C, which can barely be heard by the human -

"What's up, Dr. D?" Shego's voice interrupts his stab at thinking in poetic terms. "Hey, before I forget, I appreciate you NOT sending me a wake-up call at six AM today. Ya know, like _last_ Saturday."

All right, so he may have overestimated the rest of the world's enthusiasm for reruns of _The Jetsons_. So what? That can't put so much as a _ding_ in his paint job right now. Drakken inhales deeply to give his opening line some nice minty freshness and blares it out - "I built a doom ray in my sleep!"

"Which time?" Shego replies without missing a beat.

"Wha?" Drakken says.

"I mean, that would explain so much."

Oh, hardy-har-har.


	41. Baby Girl

**~And now, Drakken spends a little time with his niece. Post-series, obviously.**

 **The occasional grammar error or non-word is meant to capture Drakken's "voice."**

 **Thanks to everyone who's been reading! :)~**

Dr. Drakken flicks open his wallet for the sixty-seventh time today.

Instantly, he becomes one of those delectable little candies with the chocolate cream in the center, growing runnier and gooier with every heartbeat. He could not be anything less looking into the most beautiful set of eyes that genetics has ever concocted: close-set but wide in circumference, corners that tip cheerfully upward, a muddy blue that is already starting to wash into lakefoam green.

This is the most recent picture he has. The skin that fit her in radish-colored scrunches as a newborn is now clean and pale, only a few shades dimmer than Shego's. Against it her lashes are charcoal dust, and her nose out-frails his own. Those tiny lips will one day part and say, "Uncle Drakken."

Nikki. His niece.

She is almost exactly what Drakken imagines Shego would look like were she Juvinated back to a more open, innocent time. A time that was chopped short, already ancient history by the day she first rang his doorbell.

The Shego he's always known is a cactus, and Drakken can hardly blame her for it, not anymore. Now that he knows what happened to her parents, what drove her away from her brothers, he understands better why she turned herself prickly and dry, adapted too quickly into something that no longer needed nurturing.

Now, however, she is a cactus that blooms. (Well, not _literally_ blooms. That's _Drakken's_ schtick now.) She still has sharp spines that you don't want to get on the wrong side of, and she is certainly never the first one to go to when you need a hug. But she has lost the aura of a plant that would rise up out the garden and murder you if it got the chance.

Drakken sighs soft air onto his left glove as he flips through his array of photos. There's the one of himself being presented with his Global Justice uniform, one of him and a teary-eyed Mother posed in front of the UN Embassy, one of Kim Possible and the love of her life on their wedding day, one of Drakken and all of his former henchmen squinting into the camera on their trip to Disney World last summer. There's still one picture in there from his villain days. Of him and Shego the way they were then - him wearing a crooked grin that attempts to be wicked yet can't hide its sparkle; Shego in her tight-fitting jumpsuit, brandishing a handful of plasma at the camera.

It's one of the few good memories he has of that time. Reminds him that for all his midnight regrets, meeting Shego is not one of them.

Drakken glances at the clock on the wall and feels his brow fold. Its hands aren't whizzing around in circles, as is standard operating procedure for lab clocks. Today, they're _crawling_ , like the numbers have been dragged farther apart from each other, like the fabric of time is peeling back from a mistake some fool just made in the twenty-fifth century!

. . . Or like it just needs new batteries.

When at last the end-of-work whistle blows, Drakken bolts for the door. Remembers, almost too late, that he left an open Butane flame sputtering away at his workspace. Dashes back and hastens to put it out. Screams when it makes a grab for his ponytail; sighs with relief when it misses. Looks around at the curious countenances of his calmer cohorts (there's a tongue-twister for you) and says, "Heh. Sorry. I'm going to see my niece."

Knowing half-smiles are exchanged, and Drakken flashes his molars at them in return. The phrase has such a lovely meter - _I'm go-ing to see my niece! I'm go-ing to see my niece!_ \- that he decides to skip to it, one kick-hop every other syllable. In the elevator, across the above-ground lobby, and straight out into the parking lot.

Drakken pauses in front of the hovercraft to stretch his lumbar region, where the chocolate cream has solidified inside its metal cone and caused massive congestion. A few pops and grunts, and the line is puttering along again, albeit with a few creaking gears.

They're the only things in him that feel older than twenty, Drakken decides as he swings himself into the hovercraft and grins at the bundle riding shotgun. It took an entire roll of wrapping paper, as well as several creative and rather painful maneuvers, to wrap what the packaging called a "Learning Wall" - a two-foot-high panel designed specifically for babies' play, with pushable buttons, flippable switches, and toggable toggles. Every infant's dream come true, plus the Smarty Mart clerk told him it would increase Nikki's fine motor skills as well as develop her cognitive grasp of cause and effect. Drakken will be her favorite uncle for _sure_.

 _Not that it's really a competition._ Drakken feels his face pull sheepishly to one side. It's not about being the best - honest, it isn't. This little girl is just so special to him, and he wants to be special to her, too.

Upon his arrival at Shego's house, Drakken rings the doorbell and dances from one foot to the other and back again on granite that frosts his heels even through the thin soles of his boots. It _will_ be Shego. This is _her_ day to stay home with the baby, and tomorrow the hubby will stay home and Shego will go to work. Unless he mixed up his days, which is. . . ahem. . . not unheard of.

But, sure enough, it's Shego herself who answers the door, with Nikki clinging to her like a piece of ivy. Shego's mouth twitches when she sees him, and she shifts the precious baby girl to one hip, which is somewhat rounder now than when Drakken first met her. She bemoans that, though Drakken thinks it's sort of pretty on her, and it certainly doesn't subtract from the impression of someone who could put you in traction if you messed with her or her family.

"Don't laugh," is how Shego greets him.

"At what?" Drakken says, but he swallows anyway, just in case there's a renegade strand of laughter anywhere in his throat.

"This getup." Shego gives herself a peevish glance, and Drakken notices for the first time she's clad in faded jeans and a T-shirt almost down to her knees, with flaking-off letters that might have once promoted some sports team. "Hego gave me a bunch of his old rags to wear when _this_ little gal -" she smirks in Nikki's direction - "is having spit-up marathons. So, yeah, I'm not looking like much of a fashion maven right now."

She has never liked aprons, Drakken recalls now. Only time she ever wore one was when she was under the influence of the Neuro-Compliance Chip -

Okay, _when he mind-controlled her_. There's really no nice way to put it. It was a reprehensible thing to do, and he thinks it might have been the apron - the _pink_ apron - that sent her over the edge. The memory is a fist to the rib cage for more reasons than one, and Drakken sprints his thoughts away from it.

Drakken sticks one eager finger in the air. "Ah, ah, ah, Shego. Don't be putting yourself down. The most important thing in an outfit is whether or not it's appropriate for the occasion. I saw that on _The Style File_!"

Shego lets out a guffaw that echoes off the bare treetops in her front yard. "Come on in, Bozo."

Drakken does. The zest in his arms has him pumping them up and down, his fists squeezing open and shut, open and shut.

"You want to hold her?" Shego asks wryly.

"Gimme gimme gimme!" is Drakken's reply.

"All right." Shego taps her forehead to the baby's and unwinds Nikki's grip on her. "Go on, babe. Go see your Uncle Drakken."

Drakken folds his arms around her and luxuriates in the way her soft baby heft tugs at them. She is a treasure, a thousand times more vulnerable and infinitely more valuable than any motor or battery or remote, any piece of doom-ray equipment he ever handled. Even the smell of her - what he thinks is referred to as _talcum powder_ mixed with sweat too new and pure to stink yet - spurts awed warmth through his chest.

Nikki already has his sleeve clenched in her chubby little fist, bringing it up toward her mouth. If anyone else laid a finger on his lab coat, he would jolt away from them, but her touch is special. She's his niece.

Drakken tickles the side of her cheek. "How's my Nikki?" he says, hearing his voice climb three or four scales. "Huh? How's it going? Have you missed me? I missed you. Can you say 'Uncle Drakken' yet?"

Shego gives a muffled snicker from the kitchen island. "Man, if Dementor could see you now."

At the sound of the name that doesn't put a rancid taste in his mouth anymore, Drakken lets his face round into an even bigger grin. "Aww, let him look," he scoffs before his attention is captured by the delicate seashell-swirl of Nikki's ear. His eyes are so busy tracing it, around in a loop, and back out again, that he almost misses Shego's next sentence.

"Did you know he sent me a congrats card?" she says.

"Dementor did?" Drakken says absently. Not that many things in the world are smaller than the tip of his pinky finger, and he's just figured out Nikki's earlobes are one of them. "Well, that's. . . nice. I guess."

"Seemed pretty sincere." Shego wipes her hands on the messy shirt. "Oh, and did I tell you all the old henchmen sent over a care package? Baby booties, a hand-knit blanket?"

Drakken shakes his head. "First I've heard about it, but it doesn't surprise me in the slightest. Bob always had a way with a set of needles."

Odd lot, those henchmen. Taken together, they lacked only one viable skill.

Any aptitude for being evil henchmen.

Huh. They may have all dodged a bullet that way. Or at least a blast from an incredibly advanced laser system.

Plus, how many ex-supervillains get the pleasure of journeying cross-country to a theme park with their ex-henchmen? They're all welders now, waiters, baggers at grocery stores - and under the advice of Drakken's financial counselor, all of them and Drakken himself set aside some money each month to pay for a vacation someday. It took them five years, but they finally had gathered enough for Disney World.

If they continue to scrimp and save (which means no more digital shoehorns - what even _were_ those things, anyway?) in the same way, they'll be right on track to take Nikki with them by the time she's five years old. By then, she will be old enough to not only enjoy it, but also preserve it in long-term storage space. At least that's what Shego claims, and she is the one with the child development degree, so Drakken will defer to her.

Fanning actual paper _money_ between his fingers is still a happy miracle for Drakken, yet all these years later, it has lost its exotic allure. Thank goodness.

"Ah. So that's where those knitting needles came from." Shego swivels toward him, one brow spiked. "Please tell me you threw away that ducky sweater."

"No," Drakken says, taking a moment to admire how freely the truth exits his mouth. "I thought my mother might be able to use it for. . . a tea cozy. . . or something. And if ducky sweaters ever make a comeback, I'll be ahead of the trend!"

"How could they make a 'comeback' when nobody over six ever wore them in the first place?" Shego's laughter doesn't give him a chance to answer. "Man, if Elsa Klieg ever endorses _that_ , I'll lose what little respect for her I didn't lose when she gave you the idea to clone Kimmy."

Drakken instinctively claps his hands over Nikki's ears. Even though that was one of his _least_ traumatic schemes - no attempted homicides and no prison time, just an unnervingly hunky guy sitting in _his_ seat when Shego came back - he still doesn't want his precious little niece exposed to his dirty past. "Little ears, Shego," he hisses.

 _Very_ little ears. Drakken can feel their delicate ridges beneath his fingers. While he knows he and Nikki are not biological family, the difference from his own large, floppy ears is so pronounced it's difficult to believe they are even the same species. There is no chance that she will inherit the Dr. Drakken dachshund body - short legs, long torso - that is only slightly less goofy-looking on a biped.

Nikki slips her hands up under Drakken's, which have never seemed larger. She paws clumsily at one of her earlobes.

This is the age of exploration, Shego's told him, and what a fun age it is! Exhausting, too, because she wants to put everything in her mouth and crawl headfirst down the stairs - but everything's a toy to her. Even her soon-to-be-favorite uncle has become a plaything. She'll place her tiny hand over his eyebrow and squeal when it wrinkles. She'll tug at his ponytail, and his nervous system doesn't mind more than a little bit. She'll pull on his nose, and he'll pull on hers, and then she'll giggle. He loves her giggle. . .

"Yes, that's your _ear_ , Nikki!" Drakken praises her. "Can you find _my_ ear?"

Nikki pokes him in the eyelid; only a well-timed blink keeps her away from his eyeball.

"No, that's my eye," Drakken explains, trying to grit the pain away between his teeth. "Also known as my 'instrument of optics,'' but 'eye' is much easier to say."

Shego glances up from rummaging through the cupboard. "Nerd alert. Nerd alert. Nerd alert."

Nikki giggles now and jolts forward in Drakken's arms. Her spunkiness makes him smile. It also makes it much more difficult to hang on to her. Drakken wrests his entire body to the side to keep her enclosed, and one of his vertebrae clicks out of place. He seethes into the insides of his lips.

"You know, you _can_ move her to the floor in the living room." Shego scrubs at a scuff mark with her foot, and it disappears as though she is _truly_ wearing Mr. Clean Magic Erasers and the emerald-green slippers are merely a clever hologram projection.

"Indeed," Drakken says. He lowers Nikki to the carpet, breath held, and to ensure his hands will be their absolute gentlest, he imagines that she is the last piece needing to be slid into place on some incredible machine. (Slidden? Slideified?) Nikki coos and looks up at him with a grin that Drakken could swear already seems mischievous.

The liquid chocolate in his center turns to full-out ganache, which Drakken recalls from his cupcake business with both fondness and a certain amount of nausea. His legs are no longer sufficiently solid. He sinks to the floor beside her, bends down, and presses an inexpert kiss to her forehead.

Nikki thrusts a fist in the air, narrowly missing Drakken's nose.

Shego smiles from over the tea bag she's dunking up and down, in and out of a neon-lime mug that reads, _Let's pretend I'm interested._ "She's gonna grow up to kick tail. Aren't ya, squirt?"

Drakken makes a face at Shego. Watching Nikki rolling around, flailing the chubby little arms that she's just realized belong to her, he can't even begin to imagine her in womanhood. Nor does he want to. Adolescence is. . . brrr. . . . even worse. For pity's sake, she's only allotted a year to be an infant! Already she's entering new stages of development practically every other week.

Which reminds him.

"Which reminds me!" Drakken snaps his fingers, although they don't make that perfect sound that could be mistaken for a gate unlatching, not the way Shego's always do. "I have a present for her!" he says, rolling the _r_ in _present_ up and paddling it off his tongue.

"Again?" Shego rolls her eyes, another thing she does all too well. "You're gonna spoil her rotten, ya know?"

Drakken lifts his chin at her. There are worse fates than being spoiled, far worse ones. He has vowed Nikki will never get the chance to so much as experience the frostbitten loneliness he and Shego grew up with, let alone the chance to convince herself it's power-hunger or blood-lust. He walks to the hovercraft with straight-backed haughtiness.

By the time he returns with the package, however, his spine has curved so much with anticipation that he gets the feeling he's lost a good two inches of height. Nikki, of course, is too young to open it on her own, so it falls to Drakken to rip the paper off, gleeful on her behalf as well as his own. Unwrapping is so much more fun than wrapping.

"Ta-da!" Drakken cries as the paper drapes dramatically to the floor, unveiling the Learning Wall. "Don't worry," he adds over his shoulder to Shego. "It's educational."

Nikki stares at him, owl-eyed, as Drakken scoots her to his side. "See, Nikki, look! If you push the red button, the red square lights up. If you push the green button, the green square lights up. And - my personal favorite - if you push the blue button, the blue square lights up!"

Drakken pokes the blue button to demonstrate. The paler outline of a square beneath it awakens with bright, lively blue. Nikki flaps a hand in its direction.

"Also, if you flip this switch, this bell will ring!" Drakken says.

"Oh, hooray. Fun with noise," Shego says as she sips her tea.

"And flipping this back and forth will turn it yellow - then orange. Orange - then yellow!" Drakken hooks the flap between his fingertips and joggles it from orange to yellow until he forgets he's not looking at a sunset. "And the biggest light of all - the _piece de resistance_ \- is controlled by all these little purple buttons down here. Press this one, and it turns on. This one turns it off. . . but what do the five in between do?"

Shego says nothing. How someone can manage to sarcastically drink tea is beyond Drakken.

Drakken decides to just nod and answer the question Nikki would surely ask if she could. "Well, this first one here makes it change colors. See how it turns from white to red to orange and so forth?" The colors dance before Drakken's eyes like a parade of clowns. "This one makes it spin around."

 _And around and around and around._ Ethical ramifications aside, he could hypnotize someone with that thing.

"This one makes it brighter," Drakken says, his own voice sounding somewhat muffled, as though on the other side of a pillowcase. "This one makes it darker. And this one makes it flash. On. And off. On. And off. On. And off."

How long he goes on saying that, Drakken has no idea. He is mesmerized by the light, blinky and constant, and absolutely _has_ to ring the bell to accompany it. The effect soothes even as it excites, excites even as it lulls. There are no malfunctions in sight, no frustrations in the future, no cringing memories from the past.

There's only him and this minor technological marvel.

No, strike that! There is nothing "minor" about this.

Up and down the light bobs, encouraging the world. Yellow, green, blue it cycles to emphasize diversity. Around and around it spins, demonstrating the circle of life.

Which. . . great. Now he's going to have that song stuck in his head for the rest of the night. Although Drakken supposes there are worse mind-sprouts to put in roots up there.

Who invented this Learning Wall and why has he (or she) not received a Nobel Prize? Why, if people would sit and gaze into this light on a daily basis, their rage would melt away, and there would be no supervillains. This could change the world! A catalyst for world peace that could bought in Smarty Mart's baby section for nine-ninety-nine. . .

These and other groundbreaking thoughts are circling through Drakken's brain when he senses an unfriendly cold beside him. And what is cold, as he learned in physics, but the absence of warmth?

The absence of _Nikki's_ warmth.

She has already belly-scooted herself halfway across the living room, headed straight for the coffee table. A chortle begins beside Drakken's slow-broiling panic. What a challenge she is - sneaked (snuck?) away without a sound, as though she received more than her fair share of her mother's DNA.

Drakken feels his neck snap up and around and his body going in the same direction, only faster and unprepared. He topples most of the way to the ground, suspending his fall on one knee. Shego always says he looks utterly spastic when he does that, and she's probably right.

In the end, Nikki scooches herself around the coffee table, and it's Drakken who takes one of its sharp edges to the thigh. He yelps and groans, but the sacrifice was well worth it.

Drakken scoops Nikki up into his arms and rubs her plump, pure cheek to his scarred one. "Sorry I wasn't watching you, Nikki," he whispers, pitching his voice high so the sound waves will be compact enough to fit into her tiny ears. "I got distracted. Do you still love me?" After all these years, he is still something of a novice (although a wildly enthused one) at this whole "considerate" thing.

"Dr. Drakken, baby-sitter extraordinaire," Shego remarks from one the kitchen stools. Her voice is thin and dry, but her eyes are green searchbeams, alerter than usual. The only thing that stops Drakken from sticking his tongue out at her is his gratitude for her backup.

Nikki kicks to get down, and Drakken lowers her once more onto the plushy carpet. "When will she be able to say 'Uncle Drakken is a genius!'? Wait, is she talking yet?"

"Zeebad," Nikki replies.

"Just gibberish right now," Shego elaborates. "The books say she's gonna sound like she's scatting for a little while longer. Kinda reminds me of you and your little angry noises." Her lips twitch. "Maybe the two of you could do a hip-hop soundtrack."

"Oh, phoo!" Drakken does stick his tongue out that time. Hip-hop is another thing he has had a less-than-stable relationship with, even though he knows the fault was not on _its_ end. "Oh, phoo!" he repeats because Nikki is looking up at him in gummy delight, and his soul fills with milk chocolate again. "Oh, phoo!"

One giggle from her, and Drakken is instantly back at the UN, gazing out in bewilderment at a suddenly adoring crowd. "Do you know how I feel about you?" he says, the words pliable as Play-Doh.

"Gaga," Nikki says, and Drakken decides it's a valid response, because he _is_ quite gaga over her.

And it's certainly no chore to watch her while Shego changes laundry and loads the dishwasher - two sights Drakken hasn't yet adjusted to. Nikki, on the other hand, is an easy adjustment. Easy to adore, easy to lie beside on the living room floor as they gaze up at the ceiling together. Drakken imagines the ceiling to be a vast landscape of stars and finger-traces for her the layout of constellations astronomy-major college friends showed him back in the day.

The memory of that would have once soured Drakken's stomach as if a trash bag split open in there. Today, he feels nothing but the slippery ends of a banana peel, slinking through his insides with the full knowledge that it will never again be his master, even if it always remains part of him.

Nikki moves on to clopping two board books together. Drakken selects the one about shapes (early geometry practice!) and settles her in his lap so he can read it to her. He prepares for trouble as he cracks open the dense cover and is pleasantly surprised to discover that baby books only feature one sentence per page, with defined black print and large spaces between words that don't allow them to trespass into each other's borders or scramble around within their own. And even if the letters did decide to mutiny, Drakken could still recognize the shapes by _face_. (Heh. A little geometry humor there.)

After that, the two of them go on an object-naming excursion around the house, with Drakken touching nonbreakable items and pointing to the others. Lamp. Refrigerator. Television. Portable force field. Nikki takes it all in with eyes the size of her second-widest stacking ring.

Ten minutes later, Drakken is back on the floor, counting Nikki's toes, which redefine the word _petite_. That is when he notices it - the smell, a sort of musty, stagnant odor he remembers from the various stages of housebreaking Commodore Puddles. Drakken frantically glances at the carpet, halfway expecting it to be soaked in a puddle worthy of his dog's name.

It's not, yet there is no room for doubt. That scent is wafting from within the lower half of Nikki's buttery-yellow romper. (Right off the bat, Shego ix-nayed automatic pinkness for a daughter who wasn't old enough to decide for herself if she liked it.)

For a moment, Drakken is tempted to ignore it - they've been having such a great time, and now this. But ignoring it leads to diaper rash, and that leads to pain, and that leads to tears, and he will not be the uncle who does that to her.

Drakken stands up, his back shrieking a protest, loops his arms underneath Nikki's armpits, and hoists her upright. His hands stay ceremoniously away from her backside in order not to push mess into skin or be on the receiving end of potential - _ewww-uhh_ \- leaks. His walk back to the kitchen is more of a lumber than the skitter his heartbeat demands.

"Shego!" Drakken halts at Shego's side and holds her daughter out at arm's length. "She needs to be changed! Take her, take her, take her!"

Shego nods with exaggerated (and therefore likely false) wonder, then cocks her head at him in the same sharp way she does everything else. "So. . . um. . . you can't change her yourself?" she says.

Drakken feels a pink splotch surface on either side of his nose - his circulatory system's way of saying _ugh_. "No, I can't," he hisses. "She's a girl."

A smile passes across Shego's face. "Drakken, she's six months old. She's not gonna be embarrassed."

"No, but I will!" Drakken says, climbing an octave without meaning to.

Shego claps the back of her hand over her eyes. "Are you _serious_?"

"Yes." So much so that he can scarcely hear himself.

"Fine." Shego pulls Nikki into her graceful arms and pivots toward Nikki's bedroom. " _If_ you get the water boiling for the spaghetti while I do it."

Drakken hooks one foot behind the other ankle in order to prevented a collapse of relief. "That's fine, because I'm better at that anyway."

One of Shego's eyebrows hikes like a _Yield_ sign. (Or some other form of roadside warning.) "Excuse me?"

"Oh, no, no, Shego! Better at it than - _myself_! Well, better than I am at changing the diapers of - of young women who. . . who. . ."

"Save it, Silver Tongue." Shego throws a twitchy glance back at him from halfway down the hall.

Drakken grumbles only one grumble before opening the cabinet to the right of the stove and collecting Shego's black-and-white-speckled pasta pot. It's time to get some chemistry happenin'.

* * *

Alas, Nikki does not get to partake of the spaghetti, nor of Dr. Drakken's famed noodle-slurping skills. It's strained peas and straight to bed for her.

Yet what would have been an unspeakable punishment to Drakken's ten-year-old self seems to be key to Nikki's contentment. She's already droopy-lidded against Shego's shoulder and voices no complaints when laid to rest in her crib. The white rods ( _not_ bars; bars are for prison) appear to section her little body into thirds, like the toy he brought her _last_ week, a puzzle block where you can spin heads, torsos, and legs until you fall upon a match, although Drakken doesn't know anyone who plays it that way. The _real_ fun is in creating the wackiest creature you possibly can!

"Boy, she didn't make any fuss," Drakken says as he and Shego stand over the crib, peering down.

"Oh, no, she's been super about _going_ to bed lately. She'll just wake up again two, three hours later and want heaven-knows- _what_ from me." Shego's next breath would sound weary if she didn't bite down on it so hard. "She's due to start teething anytime now, and won't THAT just be a picnic in the park?"

A sense of helplessness crawls up Drakken's neck, elbowing out a petal.

At least it shatters the tension that was coming off Shego in waves. "Well, I don't think she's gonna have any trouble in botany," she says. "It'll be like, 'Hey, Nikki, you remember how it works for your uncle? Ya know, the one that's half-flower?'"

"I'm not entirely certain of your percentages, Shego," Drakken says, drawing up his neck into Official Explanation Formation and feeling the rest of him follow suit. "You see, I was one-hundred-percent human when I fell into the Hydro-Pollinator solution, and it didn't _take away_ any of that. It was more like it simply added on to what I already had, so perhaps a better -"

Drakken stops because Shego is clearly no longer listening. She has both hands pressed up to the head that must be inside that ocean of hair somewhere. "It's fine," she mutters, as if to herself. "She's not gonna be this little forever."

"You don't have to remind _me_ ," Drakken says. He feels his face pooch.

Shego regards him with a downgrade of her infamous smirk. "You sure like them at this age, dont'cha?"

"You _don't_?" Drakken gasps.

Shego throws a hand up to withhold the sheer horror that's doubtlessly spilling from Drakken's every pore. "Yeah. I mean, for Pete's sake, she's cute as can be. I'll just feel a lot better when she's old enough to talk. And walk. And, ya know, comprehend reality a little."

Before Drakken can even whip up the blueprints for a comeback, geometry wins the day again. He sees that this is one of the shapes they _didn't_ talk about in Nikki's board book, one of the complex, three-dimensional kinds that can look like a different shape from every angle. While he was dreading first days of school, first arguments, and first heartbreaks, Shego has been looking forward to conversations and companionship with her daughter. She has been waiting for a friend.

Drakken squats back on his heels and examines the sections of his niece, from the loose waves of black hair that curl onto her forehead courtesy of Uncle Hego, to her delicate baby tummy, and all the way down to the impossibly small feet encased in bumpy-soled booties. She will be strong someday, he decides as he rises again; she would have to be a xenogenesis not to. She will be strong and smart and brave and surely witty, and he will be proud of her. The thought is like one of Mother's delicious chocolate-chip cookies, swallowed whole.

Shego's voice, suddenly somber, ratchets Drakken back to attention. "You know we're gonna have to tell her sometime, right?" she says.

"Tell her about what?" Drakken says. Each landmine conversation a mother must have with her child lights up and flashes in a pattern worthy of the Learning Wall: tooth fairy, birds-and-bees, how there's no such thing as a Brontosaurus. . .

"Oh, just that her mom and her favorite uncle used to be international fugitives from justice." The snort that huffs from Shego isn't hardened to its usual consistency.

The chocolate freezes in its pipes again, and Drakken's heart-gear begins to gyrate at a frantic, spark-spewing rate.

"Eep - err, yes, I suppose that's something she should know," he sputters around the nasty taste on his gums. "But how? And when? And where?"

"You're asking me like I know," Shego says.

"You mean, you don't?" This is the most terrifying prospect of all.

"Uh, no, I don't. They don't exactly write manuals for this sort of thing."

There is uncharacteristic static amongst Shego's words. Drakken's fingers reach out and forge an awkward link through hers. Shego's are smaller than his - and stronger and more agile than his will ever be. He lets her be the first to pull away.

When she does, Drakken rocks further forward on his toes to study the crib's rods again. The spaces between them are much narrower than they are on his old crib, now lying forgotten in Mother's attic. Safety regulations, Shego's told him.

A lengthy rap sheet he's worked so hard to distance himself from unspools in Drakken's subconscious.

"What if she doesn't like me after that, Shego?" Drakken says. He's surprised the crib rail doesn't splinter beneath his hands.

Shego invokes the full snort this time. "You're an improbably likeable person, Doc. It's one of your more annoying qualities."

That is affection coming from Shego, Drakken knows, and he smiles down at Nikki's sleeping form, his own contacts bleary. Maybe she will still like him. After all, Hana - Kim Possible's speck of a sister-in-law - has learned his full villain backstory, and she still lights up and waves when he enters a room, calling, "Hi, Blue!" She knows his real name - well, his genuine alias - by this time, but she still calls him that from time to time, their special joke that stretches back to her toddler years.

"Let's just hope I'm not screwing this whole 'motherhood' thing up too much," Shego says.

The irreverence clicks back into place so seamlessly, for a moment Drakken is convinced he never saw what writhed underneath it. He starts to look away, and yet something warm and clear and chocolate appears in his brilliant brain, and he speaks it: "You love her, don't you? That's the most important part."

Shego raps a fingernail against her twitching lips. "Thank you, Dr. Spock."

"It's true, Shego!" Drakken's fingers enjoy a moment of relaxation on the wood as facts and figures, statistics and studies, all begin to march before him in a solid, dependable parade. "All the latest research done into the lives of happy adults has found that the one common - "

Something splits in, something he heard just a minute earlier, something that interferes with his information feed like a rogue radio transmission, and his fingers curl back up again. "Wait! You said her _favorite_ uncle used to be a supervillain!"

Shego winks at him, a good, true wink that doesn't make her look as though an eyelash is caught in her eye. (How does she _do_ that?) "I won't tell the others if you won't."


	42. Down the Tubes

**~Well, this was my first time writing for a henchman. So how _did_ Drakken reel his henchmen back in between _Odds Man In_ and _Stop Team Go_? My theory follows. . .  
**

 **Timeline: At the risk of being redundant, this takes place between the closing scene and the credits gag of _Odds Man In_.**

 **Major thanks to all my readers and reviewers.~**

 _Quit playing games with my head_  
 _I don't mean to be a complex boy -_

Bill snatches his phone from the ragged pocket of his jeans before his ringtone can get any further, and he knows his forehead is crunched into rows. Who'd be callin' him? Most all of his friends were all gathered around him in Fred's grandmom's vacant basement, eating chips and watching the first baseball game of the season.

The print on the screen reads, **Dr. Drakken**.

The Boss.

No, not their Boss anymore. Not for two-going-on-three weeks now. Not since their little conversation with the Vice Manager of Climatic Actions - a skinny little dude Bill never saw before, but his voice sounded like he got around, and you couldn't help but listen when he talked.

And what he was talkin' about was awful grim. How dangerous it was to be a bad guy's henchman. Homemade bombs going off at the wrong times, faulty wiring in what the Boss called his Doomsday devices, snatches 'a' fabric caught in machinery that could grind a person to shreds.

To be honest, Bill wasn't sure what was goin' on at that point anyway. He and the boys had stolen exactly what the Boss wanted, and he'd given them a buncha praise, and then he was opening a cupcake store for some reason and after a while he stopped talking about the gizmo they'd stolen or the plan it was part of or taking over the world at all.

But then Kim Possible showed up, and the Boss decided to lower her into a vat of boiling ganache. That'd been around the same time Bill and the boys had fled, so he didn't know exactly what had happened after that. Nosy little brat must've gotta away, though - the papers haven't said anything about a dead Kim Possible, and that'd be the kinda thing that makes the news. Without the Boss's stiff walks and angry gestures and all his convincin' speeches about how Kim deserved to die, Bill couldn't find it in him to be all that disappointed.

He just hoped she didn't beat the Boss up too much this time.

Couldn't be any reason why he'd be callin' now, Bill knew, unless one of them had left a pair of sunglasses behind or something. That'd be mighty nice of him.

Bill flips his phone open. "H'llo?"

In response, he gets heavy, growly breathing. Bill's chest clenches. _He's gonna yell, idn't he?_

Of _course_ he's gonna yell. Bill and the boys didn't exactly give him their two weeks' notice - just took off and left 'im standin' there. Why _wouldn't_ he be good 'n' mad?

"Boss?" Bill says. Might as well get this over with.

"Ah, Bill!" It's been weeks since Bill heard the Boss's voice, and he's almost forgotten how big it is - too big for the rest of the Boss, like a hand-me-down sweater. But right now it's also warm and thick and edged with. . . hope. Like Christmas-Eve type of hope. "Would you be kind enough to put me on speaker? I have a message for _all_ of you!"

Bill does so without thinking twice. This is the Boss after all, former or not, and Friendly Boss is the only thing easier to submit to than Fearsome Boss.

"Who is it?" Marc asks from a wicker chair.

"It's the - it's Dr. Drakken," Bill says.

Most of the boys burst out with cries of, "Hi, Drakken!" but Bill sees quite a few squirms and shuffles and darting eyes, too. Waiting to be yelled at too, he'd bet.

There's a long pause, and for a minute Bill wonders if the Boss is feelin' shy. But it turns out just to be that he's warming up his throat, clearing it - "Ah-ahem!

"Esteemed-slash-traitorous henchmen, I am offering you immunity from my wrath," the Boss says. "Should you recant and return to our agreement, any transgressions will be pardoned and the offenses wiped from your records."

Bill swallows. Uh-oh. The bigger the Boss's words get, the worse he must be feelin' about himself.

"What does that mean?" Fred asks.

The Boss lets out a huff that Bill can almost feel through the phone. "It me-eans, if you come hom - if you come back to work for me, I will forgive you and scrap my plans to turn you into an army of mutant lizards."

All the boys whip to look at Bill. He was the only one to come outta Speech class with an A-plus, so they like him to do the talking for them. "But, Boss," he says in a whisper, "we can't."

The others bob their heads - _You done good._

"Why on Earth not?" the Boss demands. His voice is brisk, impatient and important.

It's not the kinda voice you open up to, unless you've been commanded to.

Bill tries to clear his own throat, but a nervous something squeaks in it, and he doesn't sound near as impressive as the Boss. The Boss who's waiting on the other end of the line with his arms hangin' at his sides - Bill can hear the _swish-swish_ of them against his fancy new belt, and it's much scarier than his Speech teacher's nylons rubbing together. "We're scared," he says simply.

"Scared?" The Boss's laugh is phony - much higher than it should be and clipped to a perfect end. "Goodness gracious, of what? Of me? Of your paychecks? Of success?"

Bill's lips go dry as raisins. "No, Boss - of what the Vice-Manager of Climatic Actions told us."

"What?" The Boss's shoulders are hunchy now, Bill can tell.

"He was tellin' us how risky it was to work for a supervillain. We work with all this dangerous stuff, and he was quotin' all these facts 'n' figures -"

"Statistics," Clyde pipes up. It's the first word he's said all day.

"Oh, for the love of all things wicked!" the Boss explodes. "In the first place, that was _not_ the real Vice-Manager of Climatic Actions! It was Kim Possible's little - her boyfriend, all right?"

"Ron Stoppable," Clyde puts in.

"Whatever. Him. He was trying to frighten you away from your work in hopes that he could delay her glorious end!" the Boss says.

"Well, that makes sense," Bill says with a nod. "What a good boyfriend."

Bill hears air sizzle between the Boss's teeth. That means he's tryin' to keep his temper under control, and Bill's kinda proud 'a' him.

"Yes, well, now you see why he did what he did," the Boss says at last. "And in that position, anyone will say anything, so I'm certain he exaggerated the dangers of our lifestyle at the very least!"

Bill remembers all the axes and machetes they found behind the Boss's lab coats last time they cleaned his closet. He doesn't answer.

"All right, yes, perhaps it _is_ hazardous to work for a supervillain. But there's certainly no great risk in working for a cupcake salesman - and since my plan was foiled, I'm perfectly content to be just that until I can think of another one!" The Boss's voice, still thick and warm, turns sweet and perky now too, and it makes Bill picture the ganache. In the vat. Boiling while it waited for Kim and her chubby-cheeked friend to be pulled down into it.

"Really?" Bill says.

"Absolutely! After all, Operation Next Ice Age went sky-high when that factory did." Bill's pretty sure he hears the Boss dust his hands together.

"What?" Fred jumps to his feet, his usually-clenched fists now open and disbelieving. "Your factory _blew up_? You didn't mention that!"

Murmurs creep out of the rest of the boys, too. All but Bill, who couldn't move his tongue now if you paid him.

"All right, so I forgot one small detail. . ." There is no more ganache in the Boss's voice. It's leakin' air every which way. "Surely you aren't going to forfeit on those grounds? The point is, no harm came to anyone. Not even that infernal Kim Possible."

Somethin' miserable happens inside Bill's eyes. He closes 'em. Sees ugly yellow warning signs behind 'em. Asks a question because there's nothin' else to do - "How's the cupcake business going, Boss?"

"Oh, it's quite the _sweet_ operation." The Boss chuckles all loud and proud at his own joke. "Actually, we've had a few slowdowns over the past couple weeks. All of a sudden, the world's down on carbohydrates - Perkins is in a bit of a snit over it. Just a passing fad, though, and any doubts will be removed when we launch our new advertising campaign!"

The words are full and happy, and Bill feels himself stiffen. "Gee, if things are goin' so well, I don't see why you'd need us anymore."

Insteada the thoughtful silence Bill was hopin' for, there's a series of quick sputters from the Boss. "Wha? Nonononono, of course! Many hands make light work. That's the motto of the cupcake industry. Well, I don't know if it's their official motto, but they say it quite a bit. Honest, they do."

Bill folds his arms. Louder than the Boss's stammerin', he hears that Stoppable dude: "Evil henchmen have a fatality risk sixty percent higher than the rest of the working world."

And Bill's watched enough episodes of _With All My Heart Surgeon_ to know what "fatality" means.

"You'd really quit over some teenager's scare tactics?" A clacking sound as the Boss stomps his foot. "What does Stoppable even know, anyway? He'd have to have pulled those 'statistics' out of thin air, unless by some chance he's related to an actuary!"

Bill's fingers twitch. He's about to either ask what an actuary is or hang up, when the Boss suddenly sniffles. It's probably supposed to be another one of them mad-breaths, but - nope, it's a sniffle, moist and hot. "You'd believe Stoppable over me?" the Boss whimpers.

A thought kicks Bill harder than Kim ever did. _The Boss misses us._

He wouldn't have guessed it. The Boss constantly grumbles about what an incompetent bunch of idiots they are, and why did he hire them anyway?

Bill wonders that himself from time to time. They didn't have any villain-training - this was their first gig. The Boss might've gotten the wrong number looking for a group of real tough guys. The Boss mixes up numbers sometimes, and it embarrasses him so much they aren't allowed to talk about it.

The rest of the boys frown, rub their necks, scratch their chins. Everybody's thinkin' too hard to say anything, so silence falls. Bill's not totally aware of it until the phone in his hand erupts with a shout of, "Fine! I'll do it all myself, then! Heaven knows I'm capable of it. Who needs - who needs the evil fam - who needs you?"

A wet crack ends the shout. Unless Bill's badly mistaken, the Boss is crying.

Alone in a dark warehouse somewhere.

Man, the Boss hates to cry. Hates it worse than he hates number mix-ups or blowing himself up, worse than any of people he's ever tried to get rid of.

Bill glances out at the mess of faces, some of 'em pale, some others with tan lines on the lower halves from their hooded uniforms. And all of 'em pinched in at the corners, 'cuz they're all hearin' the same thing.

One by one, every head starts to bob.

A week later, Bill is presented with a paycheck for exactly double the wages in his contract. So are all the other henchmen, and in a huddle they agree not to bring it up and embarrass the Boss while he's still moody.

He just mixes up numbers sometimes.

* * *

"Drakken, we gotta talk."

The terse words lift Dr. Drakken's eyes from his desk, though his teeth remain hooked in the plastic lid of his Styrofoam latte cup.

Before him stands Hank Perkins, one hand clenched in front of his tie as though to reinforce its knot. _His_ eyes, usually agleam with a stoic sense of adventure, are flatter than frying pans.

That only compounds Drakken's interest (heh - business pun). What has turned his business partner so frowny-mouthed today?

Drakken unhooks the cup and sweeps his arm generously over the chair opposite his. "By all means, Perkins. Have a seat."

Hank sinks into the chair and discards his briefcase in a move smooth and practiced. Drakken adjusts from a grin to his most distinguished expression.

"It's about Hank's Gourmet Cupcakes," Hank says.

"Of course it is." Drakken nods with Superior CEO Knowledge. "Do go on."

Hank's fingers spread like webbing across his thighs. "I'm sure you've noticed we're in trouble."

No, they're not. _In trouble_ is when you're cornered in the prison yard by inmates who could punch a refrigerator in half. _In trouble_ is when Kim Possible rapidly descends from your ceiling just in time to plant a foot in your solar plexus. They are not _in trouble_.

All right, so the cupcakes aren't quite as popular as they used to be. Rather than the crowds that swarmed the stores on opening day, customers now trickle in one at a time, with great elapses in between. Their stocks have fallen. Hank has begun to speak with clouds in his voice.

Drakken leans forward, nearly leaving his chair, and Hank slants in his vision. "What about our new marketing campaign? Didn't that put an uptick in our profits?"

"Marginal," Hank says. "The ads haven't worked. Handing out free samples has only made things worse. I'm afraid we've only got one option left."

"We're going to have to open a new branch?" Drakken _does_ leave the chair this time. Shoots upright with visions slick in his mind of ribbon ceremonies and shiny glass cabinets filled with masterfully circled cupcakes, topped with frosting shiny enough to refract light and a maraschino cherry centered with a scientist's exactitude.

Hank looks at him as if he's suggested flavoring their cupcakes with sulfur. "What, are you crazy? No." Hank hunches forward. Their shadows have merged on the far wall. "Drakken - we gotta close up shop."

A record scratch resounds through Drakken's mind. It does not get its grip around what has just been said to him for a good half-minute. When it does, his jaw almost unfastens, and anger ignites the floor beneath Drakken's feet. Before it can travel to his brain, he forces a chuckle, mousier than he intends. "What? I could have sworn you just said we were going to go out of business."

"It's true. We're flat outta cash." Hank's face is pained. Not pained enough.

" _WHAT_?!" Drakken erupts. His ankles jitter, insufficient to prop him upright, but he will not sit down, he will not. "Is it - is it because of the lattes? Because I can give those up, really, I can. I can give up anything. Everything -"

"That's very, uh, kind of you," Hank says. "But in the end, that would just be a drop in the bucket."

Where is this bucket? He'd like to kick it over.

Drakken settles for the next best thing - his wastebasket. It wheels crazily to the other side of the room, where it spins on its side like Uranus. "NO! No, no, no! Not this time! Not now! Not _here_! NO!"

Hank watches the wastebasket with a look that embodies bankruptcy. How could Drakken have not seen this coming?

Stupid question. He claims to be an evil genius and a born tyrant, never a psychic. But how could this have happened? How? How could it have possibly -

 _Possibly_. Of course. That's it right there. Kim Possible! She was responsible for the destruction of their main warehouse, and she's probably been running a word-of-mouth sabotage campaign ever since. Spreading lies about their batter being wormy and their frosting being expired and their carbon footprint being the size of Texas. . .

"Is it Kim Possible?" Drakken says. "Did _she_ do this to us? Just for spite?"

"Um, no," Hank says. "No, from what I could sniff out, all of our sources are citing the low-carb trend. It's been killer even for established bakeries, much less specialty ones that started as fronts for world-conquering plots."

Ah, yes. All that noise. The great flock of human sheep were blindly following a man by the name of Dr. Atkins, which was only one mangled pronunciation away from that of their _true_ ruler. All he'd need was a spokesperson with a Cockney accent or something. . .

Drakken locks and loads another chuckle, but it malfunctions into a whinny, long and entirely too shrill. "Wait, _that_ low-carb craze? Why, that's a passing fad, nothing more!"

"Well, if it is, it's not passing quickly enough to be any help to us. We shoulda been in front of it." Hank sinks back down into his chair, reaches into his suit jacket, and pulls out his checkbook - wait a minute, no! Blue covering, cracked binding - that's _Drakken's_ checkbook.

Hank pans through the pages so fast his fingers seem to grow points. "There's also been the matter of some reckless spending." His words come out at their usual rapid-fire pace, as though a surplus is being charged per second.

"Reck _less spend_ ing?" Drakken shoots back, so quickly he could swear he feels a ligament tear somewhere.

"Yep." The checkbook wags in Hank's hand, taunting Drakken. "Particularly when you decided to double the henchmen's salary upon their return."

Hank speaks as if it were a rash decision rather than a craftily calculated lure-back of valuable employees. Drakken can't do the heavy lifting on his own, after all, and Shego hasn't exactly been supportive of his new venture - in the slightest. She hasn't been seen around the shop in days, and he misses her company, razor-tongued as it often is.

That is when the mad fire reaches Drakken's head. It incinerates the sentences, _No! I wasn't just throwing money away! That was an investment in our future!_ until only ashy syllables spill over his lips.

"Look, I'm sorry, Drakken," Hank says as Drakken continues to sputter. "But there's no way we can continue without goin' into the red."

Drakken clamps back his first thought - _I've lived in the red more often than not. Who cares?_ That is not the reaction of the honest, responsible businessman he has been for over a month now.

And now even that section of his life has been worn down into a stub, ready to be thrown away.

Drakken folds his arms, which shiver in sudden cold, unprotected by the short cups of his sleeves. "So. . . it's really over, then?"

He never noticed before how heavy the word _over_ is. Heavy and prickly. It's one big thumbtack traveling up his gullet.

Hank nods without disturbing a strand of his pristinely swirled red hair. His crisp posture makes Drakken's three-inch advantage irrelevant. "Yeah. It really is."

Drakken tenses, prepared to swat away the offer of a sympathetic hand. Only it's never offered, and the tension goes strangely unrelieved.

His fingertips tap together. "So, what are we going to do now?" he asks Hank.

Bewilderment is delivered in response. "'We'?" Hank says.

It's a strange word to misunderstand, yet Drakken pounces on the chance to reassert his intellect. "Yes, we! You know - me, you, Shego, and the henchmen -"

Hank must have a mouth cramp, because that does not qualify as a smile by anyone's standards. "Sorry, Dr. Drakken. You and Shego and the henchmen can do whatever you like. As for myself, I'm taking my show back on the road." Every shade of Brooklyn is already formal, more starched than Drakken's polo.

Drakken's fingers miss each other, skewing in opposite directions, and he knows his eyes are crossing. "Wha?" he yips again.

"I help villains maximize their potential. You aren't my only client, and now I've got to move on." Hank collects the briefcase that swings obediently at his side. "Got a call from a very bright young woman who wants to know how to make the best use of her shapeshifting ability."

His gaze sweeps Drakken from ponytail to imported shoes, and for the first time in weeks he's blood-rushingly aware that he's blue. Drakken has never hated shapeshifters more than in that moment.

Come to think of it, maybe that's his problem. Maybe _she_ is the one standing here, wearing Hank's body, delivering such awful news to him in order to steal Hank's professional services for herself. Maybe the real Hank is gnawing his way through a rope somewhere, and will soon show up to set the whole mess right!

Drakken glances at the empty doorway, where his wastebasket has finally thudded to a stop, spitting up paperwork and cupcake wrappers.

Any second now.

"Forgive me, Perkins. My ears must be failing." Drakken's voice seems to come from the fluttering vein in his neck - a vein that hasn't shown itself since the day Hank's Gourmet Cupcakes officially opened its marvelous doors. "I could have sworn you just said you were. . . walking out on this endeavor."

 _Please shake your head. Please let my ears be failing. I'll go get a hearing aid, and I won't even complain about being an old geezer, if you'll just -_

But Hank's nod is dispassionate. "I'm moving on," he says. "I suggest you do the same."

Red dots erupt behind Drakken's eyes. He thinks nothing of shooting across the desk, toppling the latte cup, and seizing Hank by his fancy out-turned lapels. "You. . . _infidel_!" Drakken cries. "Whatever happened to 'a problem is just a misunderstood opportunity'?"

Drakken hears himself head into a high pitch, the kind Shego employs when she is mock-quoting him. Why, oh why, does it work so well on her and sound more like a chipmunk with a bad head cold when it's him? Dr. Drakken's throat was made to thunder, not taunt, that's why. He prays his wrath will not be interrupted - that's something that always seems to happen in situations such as this, and it's a blight on his fearsome reputation.

Hank shimmies his shoulders and pops straight out of Drakken's grip, which always surprises Drakken. His fingers could be mistaken for talons in poor lighting, so it always seemed they should have the matching ruthless grip. "This _is_ an opportunity that _you're_ misunderstanding," Hank says, sinking into the chair. "An opportunity for me to go out and help other villains get back on their feet."

Drakken rallies his hands into fists, pounds them on the desktop. The overturned latte does a hula-hoop across it. "I thought we were friends," he hisses.

He knows as soon as he's said the words that he shouldn't have; they find no traction and skid uselessly into the opposite wall without ever touching Perkins. The man he was, apparently, mistaken to trust.

The man who stares straight through him, as though Drakken is one of those glass frogs in the Amazon rainforest with the digestive tracts you can watch in action through their transparent skins. A speck of paranoia in Drakken's head urges him to glance downward and make certain his internal organs aren't showing, but he refuses to move his glare from Perkins's bored assessment.

Perkins rises to his feet, and everything on his body snaps smartly into place. His confident competence - his competent confidence - whatever you call it, whatever it is, it rubs rashlike against Drakken's skin.

"We were business partners," Perkins says. "And we no longer have a business. Good day, Dr. Drakken."

No parting insults scroll through Drakken's brain. His wrath has been worse than interrupted. It has been audited and found worthless. He's off his game, out of practice, hasn't truly been a supervillain in a month now.

Drakken can only gawk with his lower lip rolled forward as Perkins turns on a patent-leather sole and strolls out the door. A grand leave-taking is not on the man's agenda. Perkins simply exits, as though he is not walking out on goals and opportunities and dreams and. . . and. . .

Friendships.

The door clicks politely shut behind him.

Drakken shoots from his chair and twitches there in semi-upright fashion, his blood spiky and aflutter. The spring sunshine washes through the window and scatters hopeful light across Drakken's face.

He wishes he could permanently blacken it.

His chest is hollow, his gut craving doom and destruction once more. He hasn't been this upset with anyone in the recent past - not even with Kim Possible when she showed up to thwart the plan he wasn't even terribly enthused about anymore. The Death By Ganache trap was fun, one of the most creative endings he ever dreamed up for her, but at that point Drakken was more going through the motions than relishing vengeance.

If she showed up now, Drakken wouldn't hesitate to turn her to ash. He can already taste the smoke.

It was nice while it lasted.

* * *

The familiarity of his lair should be a comfort. And yet evil lairs were never built to bring comfort, not even to their lords and masters. The shark tanks seething below the floors, the lofty dark ceilings, the pit-of-spikes traps with the fake skulls suspended on poles above them - it all seems to be keeping its distance from him, as though it resents him for abandoning it. Which Drakken knows is perfectly ridiculous, since architecture has no emotions, no mind or heart or soul. . .

What _was_ a comfort was slipping back into his lab coat that bags at the waist now (even with the belt) and his soft-soled boots that swish across his stone floors with the most authoritative _shush-shush_.

They're doing it right now as Drakken paces an ellipse around his lab. He feels strange, baggy like his lab coat, as if he doesn't quite fit into himself anymore either. Every few minutes, he'll think he smells chocolate and whip around only to find nothing there. No frosting tubes, no ganache machines, no batter whisking through the beaters.

He's been at it for he-doesn't-know- _how_ many hours when his Intruder Alarm blares in conjunction with the doorbell.

Drakken scurries over to his security screens. Maybe he ordered a package and forgot about it. Or maybe Shego bought him a consolation present, and it's a surprise!

No. It's _Hank Perkins_ standing there, still with his briefcase attached to his hand and his earpiece embedded. . . well, exactly where you would expect an earpiece to be. His face is pleasant, eyebrows in a lift. This is Perky Perkins.

Drakken's finger hovers between the giant red button that will summon his security system and the smaller green one which will deactivate the alarm.

 _Eenie-meenie-miney-mo. . ._

Immediately after he pushes the green one, Drakken remembers that eenie-meenie-miney-mo is useless when deciding between two options - there are an even number of syllables, so it will choose the second every time. Nothing he can do about it now, though.

The lair's front door opens, and Drakken leans casually out, simpering at Hank. "Changed your mind already, huh, Perkins?" he drawls.

 _Now_ Hank shakes his head. "Far from it. I'm here to deliver our surplus inventory."

That's when Drakken sees the four black helicopters parked on the landing strip behind Hank. HenchCo-issued, of course - the little traitor!

All business terms evaporate from Drakken's mind. What comes out of his mouth despite receiving a unanimous veto from the rest of his body is, "Inve _what_?"

Perkins's eyelids fall to half-mast. "We have eight thousand extra cupcakes to get rid of."

Drakken crunches his wrists onto his hips so hard they hurt; there is no fat to soften the blow anymore. "And that's _my_ fault somehow?"

Perkins sighs, as if explaining something to the class dunce. "No. But it was agreed upon that in the event of the cessation of business, surplus inventory would be delivered to the lair of Dr. Drakken."

"I agreed to no such thing!" Drakken says.

"Of course you did. Right here in our contract." Hank pulls a clipboard around so the signature portion of the page nearly prods Drakken in the chest. His face is blank, flat, borderline harsh. Suddenly he's a critic.

Drakken gazes down at the signature. The _D_ 's alone are enough to prove it's his - slanting to the left, their bulges squeezed, the ending lines missing the main stalk by a fraction of a centimeter.

There were so many papers he signed. This one, Drakken didn't read the whole thing - how could he have, and why would anyone expect him to? The print is microscopic, and he didn't _bring_ a microscope with him into Perkins's cubicle.

Men in HenchCo purple climb from the helicopters, toting freakishly large boxes of cupcakes with them. They keep coming and coming and coming, like the decimals in an irrational number, without end.

He should have let the security system fry Hank after all.

And that's when it happens. The thing that always happens, his greatest fear: The magnitude of this betrayal wallops Drakken and leeches him of power, so that he only has enough fight to (barely) fend off tears.

Drakken clenches the clipboard so hard he feels a nail break, even through his gloves. He flips his head away from Perkins and does not bring it back until he has perfected a steel-laced near-whisper. "I thought I could trust you, because your name is Hank!"

There. It is the truth, delivered in an invulnerable package.

Perkins doesn't wither like he's supposed to. His forehead merely puckers. "What?" he says in a vacant tone.

Oh, for pity's sake - he doesn't _know_? Yes, the man is too young to have caught the original airing, but surely everyone has seen the reruns every single year. "You know, like Snowman Hank. . ." Drakken says.

"I don't have time for this," is Perkins's response. He peels the page back and reveals a tiny receipt clipped on beneath it. "Initial here to indicate you've received delivery, please."

Snatching the clipboard from Perkins, Drakken gives the receipt a scan - nothing more than a note saying eight thousand extra cupcakes were delivered to his lair - and initials it _D.D_. Drakken returns the clipboard and declares, "You are not worthy to bear his name!"

"Goodbye, Dr. Drakken." The formality to Perkins's words is crushing. "I wish you the best."

"I'm going to write you a very bad review on Yelp," Drakken mutters.

Perkins has the nerve to smile. "You do that. _Ciao_."

Drakken blows a raspberry (okay, a _blue_ berry) at Hank's retreating suit. After thirty minutes, the HenchCo chumps finally run out of cupcake boxes to haul in, and they jump into the helicopters and fly away without bidding Drakken adieu at all. They must know that if any of them spoke to him, he would shove them straight off the cliff and leave them at the mercy of the sea.

The boxes are now stacked in the main room, the entrance, in towers twice Drakken's height. Each individual box is longer than a yardstick and so deep Drakken could stand in it up to his thighs. Of course, he'd get icing between his toes. . .

Drakken tips backward against one stack that feels more solid than his legs right now. It had been good, the cupcake industry. If he concentrated very hard, he almost didn't hear the echo of maniacal laughter, so far removed now. Almost didn't see a thousand sets of numbers counting down on a thousand overly dramatic timers. Almost didn't feel the heat of a Diablo's rocket blasters as it had revved from toy to death machine.

Almost found some goodness in himself.

Guess it wasn't meant to be.

Ponytail crushed against a box, Drakken lets a moan escape. Perkins's mettle has been tested and come back with a large red _F_ scrawled across it. No, make that an _F-minus_!

On top of it all, he's stuck with all these cupcakes. All these yummy, yummy cupcakes that will rapidly mold and turn stale and have to be thrown away. And Drakken was raised never to throw food away. They were a single-income family - a single- _female_ -income family, which made an even bigger difference thirty-some years ago. There was no room for wastefulness.

Drakken crosses over to the doors that meet jaggedly in the middle and locks them via the control panel on the wall. He is lonely, but he cannot go out there now, cannot face Shego's smooth marble skin and flesh-tearing words.

Or the henchmen. He wouldn't be in this whole stupid mess to begin with if he hadn't been so desperate to lure them back into his hire. And for what? What are they even good for?

Drakken kicks a cupcake box, yipping when his toes double back from the strength. Its lid slips askew, and the heavenly scent of vanilla-based frosting slides into Drakken's nose and into his nerves, raising goose bumps on his limbs.

All these cupcakes. All these yummy, yummy cupcakes that shouldn't be thrown away.

He better get started pronto.

The first genuine smile of the day, if not the entire week, slides across Drakken's face. He can feel it tickling his earlobes as he reaches into the box and pries out his first victim, fingers shaking with eagerness aplenty. Like some medications, some news needs to be taken with food.

 **~To be continued in a later chapter. . .~**


	43. My Cousin's Keeper

**~Got to have some fun playing around with a new perspective - Motor Ed's. I wanted to make his voice distinct from Drakken's or Shego's. Let me know what you think.**

 **Timeline: between _Car Alarm_ and _The Big Job_.**

 **Note: Motor Ed has objectifying thoughts about women because Motor Ed.~**

The worst thing about prison was that it was so _boring_.

Seriously.

Wasn't nothin' to do. Wasn't nothin' to see. Wasn't nothin' to crush.

The klink did offer a few of what they called "betterment classes" - Motor Ed hadn't even known "betterment" was a word. Taught guys how to make stuff with their hands. Helped them earn their high school diplomas. There was even an auto-repair shop, which Motor Ed had been totally ready to sign up for, except that little buzzkill who called himself a "psychiatric evaluator" got to the warden before he could and told him Motor Ed was "not to be trusted around large vehicles."

"Everything else is open to you, though," the warden had said - like there'd be anything else worth doin'.

The other guys were bored, too, Motor Ed could tell. They pumped as much iron as possible and when they were away from the weight machines, they just beat up on the smaller guys. Never made much sense to Motor Ed. If everybody already knew you could bench-press two-eighty, what was supposed to be so impressive about wallopin' a guy who didn't even weigh _one_ -eighty?

There was also a rotten lack of babes. Motor Ed hadn't seen a pretty face or a hot body since the day of his rockin' road trip with Green Babe. She hadn't been honored that he'd chosen her - out of all the babes in the world - to be his accessory. Matter of fact, she threw him out of the car, fired up her green magic and rained punches all over him.

At first, Motor Ed had thought maybe that was her way of flirting. Green Babe knew how he felt about scrappy chicks. But when they'd hit the river and he'd burst out with, "Dude, I dig a babe who -" she lashed toward his throat with those primo fingernails of hers - really, how long has she been growin' those? Only a quick backstroke had saved it from getting sliced.

That was when Motor Ed knew that she was out to kill him, _seriously_ kill him, and he hadn't even made it to Alaska yet. She'd waded hip-deep toward him, those beautiful green eyes of hers all fiery, and then the police showed up with their guns drawn. Motor Ed was more'n happy to run back into their clutches.

Still, what he wouldn't give to see them legs again, even wrapped in fed-pen-orange. Hoo, _mama_!

Had to be a prettier sight than the faces he was sitting across from. Half of 'em needed to shave, like, yesterday. Most of 'em had eyes underlined with bags. And Stu's was sportin' a shiner the size of a hubcap that he'd gotten this morning tusslin' with Leif from Cell Block J over the remote.

It musta been almost as humiliating losin' to a guy with a name like a Viking as it was to lose to a chick - and then have _another_ chick, who'd had basically nothin' to do with the whole thing, take all the credit. Motor Ed'd hardly remembered Red had even been there, but he went ahead and glared at her on his way to the squad car. That was just what you were supposed to do when bein' hauled away.

Red returned it with a grimace-y smile. "And there goes what was once the world's foremost mechanical engineer," she said, her voice dripping poison.

She seriously didn't get it, did she? In here was better'n out there for Motor Ed. In here, at least nobody trashed his hair. No one dissed his mellow. He had respect here. Not that people bowed down when he walked by, but he was able to do his own thing without nobody buggin' him - which was all he'd ever wanted to do anyway.

You just couldn't expect a babe to understand about those dude things, Motor Ed decided. Especially not one that young and stupid. Red had had a buncha goodies on her tricked-out old car, and she hadn't even known how to use 'em right.

Motor Ed twirled his fork into his spaghetti strands now and licked some sauce from his mustache. "Dude," he said. "I wish prison was still like it used to be in all those old cartoons, and we had to work on the rock pile. Then at least I'd get to _crush_ somethin'!"

"Yeah, but just think about what it'd do to Pyro Pete and the rest of them sacks-of-bones," Maurice said. He squashed his fingers against his empty milk carton. "Soon as they hit rock, they'd shatter."

"So much the better, huh?" Stu grinned. "I'd love to handle some of those quarry hammers. I could show Leif that there are a lot of places a heck of a lot worse than the eye to get hit."

Motor Ed bellowed with laughter. "I see what'cha did there! Wicked, man. High-five!" He leaned across the table and slapped his palm against Stu's. Stu's fingers stayed all stiff, like they weren't really ready to high-five him back.

As soon as Motor Ed's butt hit the bench again, a huge roar went up from the other end of the cafeteria. A mess of prisoners crowded in a circle around one of the tables that'd been bolted to the floor. Above them, a guard straightened up and signaled for the guard on their side to get over there. He didn't look nervous, this first guard, but he moved his hands all urgent-like.

Motor Ed's ears pricked up. "That's more like it!" he cried.

The second guard took off in the direction of the commotion. Motor Ed coulda sworn he felt the floorboards shake under them, and he started to lunge after 'im. If there was a fight, Motor Ed wanted to be in on it. It'd been too long since he'd womped someone.

But right then another prisoner came _outta_ the chaos, jogging their way - a guy whose pudgy little neck was scaled up with tattoo ink until it burrowed into his collar. Whole thing was a sea monster; Motor Ed had seen it when they showered. He was the least likely of anyone in Cell Block D to throw a punch, so Motor Ed didn't think nothin' of grabbin' his arm and shoutin', "Hey, you! What's goin' on? Fight?"

The dude shook his head. "No. No fight. Someone just passed out cold over there."

Motor Ed shrugged at his cell block buddies, who shrugged right back at him. Nobody's forehead even went wrinkled.

"Just. . . passed out?" Stu said. Motor Ed had never seen his eyes widen or narrow before, and they sure as heck weren't doin' it now, what with one of 'em swollen into a creepy wink. "He didn't get _knocked_ out?"

Another head-shake from the dude. "Nope. His cell mate said he stood up really fast and then just keeled over."

"Drunk?" Maurice asked.

The dude shrugged, and his neck-scales rippled. "Wouldn't surprise me. Who knows?"

Now _this_ was exciting. You had to be super-crafty and daring to even think about getting booze in here. Maybe some guy had managed to smuggle beer in through a hollow shoelace. Motor Ed'd seen that on TV once.

"Who was it?" Motor Ed asked. He had to get him one of those.

"That one blue guy," the dude panted, hands on his knees.

All the feelin' went outta Motor Ed's arms. Which was fine - he didn't need 'em anyway. Just his legs, which vaulted right over the scale-guy's head and skidded across the cafeteria faster'n than the Kepler itself.

Motor Ed didn't know how many blue men there were in the world, but he did know Cell Block D only had the one.

"That's my cousin! Seriously! My cousin!" Motor Ed cried. He barreled toward the crowd, which broke in half to let 'im through, like the waters in that one Sunday School story.

Lyin' in a heap on the tile was an orange jumpsuit. Motor Ed had to take two more steps to see that there was a dude inside it, a dude who looked dented and squashed and broken.

"Drew! Cuz!" Motor Ed's voice shook. It'd never done that in here before, not even once. He hadn't let it. Had a reputation with this crowd.

But this was Cousin Drew, who had so many rockin' sweet doom machines. Who hated Red as much as he did. Who'd helped him learn his multiplication tables.

If there was any snickers, Motor Ed never heard 'em.

Wasn't no blood, either. He took that in after a second. Drew was just flat as a flapjack, sacked on a chest that made pumpin' up and down look harder than it shoulda. No sign that anybody had messed him up.

One guard was half-turned, holster angled at the traffic to show he still meant business, his focus on a brown-haired guy who yammered away at him. "- and-he-kind-of-swayed-for-a-minute-so-I-said, Yo-Drakken-What's-up-pal-and-then-the-next-thing-I knew-he-was-on-the-ground-just-like-this-do-you-think-he-hit-his-head-when-he-fell-it-almost-looked-like-he-hit-his-head-but-it-all-happened-so-fast -" all flooded out so that the guy barely had time to breathe.

Motor Ed squatted down beside Drew and gave his scarred cheek a firm pat. It was the closest they'd been to each other in a year. A couple times, he'd spotted Drew scowling across the multipurpose room at him, like he was sore at him for somethin'. Maybe he thought the way Green Babe did, that he'd been trying to doom the world when all he wanted to do was cruise cross-country. There were two things he needed for that plan: a sweet ride and a hot babe. And the hottest babe he knew happened to be in prison, so Motor Ed had been a good cousin, stopped in and said hi to Drew on his way to break her out.

"Drew? You gotta wake up now. You look stupid. Seriously, you do." Motor Ed leaned back on his ankles and stared right between his cousin's eyes.

This was freaky. Drew had always had this sorta, ya know, driven energy that kept him runnin' better than diesel fuel. Him stayin' still was as sad a sight as one of them radical historic-type cars in a museum, boxed up in glass 'cause it would never run again.

He had an awful, rank smell on him, too, like puke and sour armpits. Somethin' rippled down Motor Ed's spine, the kinda feeling you got when you touched a live wire by mistake. He jabbed himself between Drew and the mob of leering cons that the second guard was still shooing away.

"We should probably get him back to his cell," the first guard said.

"I'll carry 'im," Motor Ed said right away. His jam was frozen by a sudden cold thought - couldn't anybody else in here be trusted to look after Drew.

The first guard glanced up at Motor Ed. "Seriously?" he said.

A flash of relief touched off in Motor Ed's mind. "Seriously! You can absolutely count on me, bro."

The guard didn't say a word, didn't smile, but the sharp line between his eyebrows smoothed out and he nodded at Motor Ed, one hand hooked in his holster.

Motor Ed hunkered down and scooped Drew into his arms. Didn't take mucha his strength. Drew felt bony as a fossil. Motor Ed's heart turned over like a car engine.

He'd never thought of his cousin as puny before. Drew was shorter, thinner than he was - Mama liked to joke that Motor Ed had only been smaller than Drew for the first six months of his life, and it was pretty much true. But with his loud, deep voice and his bristlin' nervous energy, he'd always seemed big to Motor Ed.

Now Drew looked small, so totally small. The orange jumpsuit that was too tight on Motor Ed was too loose on Drew. His frame dipped in, hollow. He was suddenly somethin' fragile, somethin' easy to crush, more like a spark plug than a 6000-horsepower motor. It put sweat on the bottoms of Motor Ed's feet.

Motor Ed pushed out his chest as far as he could, and it didn't even bump Drew's shoulders; that was how turned-in they were. "Lead the way," he said to the guard.

It was sorta awesome, havin' a police escort. Gettin' ushered to the front of the cafeteria, the crowd partin' for him, as he lifted his cousin outta the chaos like some hero firefighter. Each new step was the most careful one he'd ever taken.

Out the door. Down the hall that Motor Ed had always imagined would feel less narrow once you didn't have to prepare to duck the next punch. It didn't. Carryin' Drew was like carryin' a homemade bottle rocket - you had no idea when he'd flare back to life, sprint away, run into somethin'.

The guard stopped at the kitchen to pocket a bag of Saltine crackers. Motor Ed focused resolutely on the stained walls the entire time. Kept him from glancin' down at Drew's face. Limp as it was, it shoulda looked relaxed, and it didn't.

'Least if Drew woke up now, he'd see that his cousin had broken a sweat carrying him.

Finally, they arrived back at Drew's dinky little cell, after another pit stop at the showers for a washcloth. The guard unlocked the cell door and prodded Motor Ed inside with his keys. Practically had to duck to get in through the doorway, tryin' not to fold Drew in half in the process. His older cousin was one of the few things in his life Motor Ed _hadn't_ ever had the urge to crush.

"On the cot," the guard instructed as he locked the door behind them.

Motor Ed crossed the cell in a half-step. For the first time in his life, he wished he was smaller so he could set Drew down more gentle-like. His arms hulked heavy, almost blotted out Drew entirely as Motor Ed slipped him onto a mattress that didn't really even sag under him. Drew kinda oozed to one side, and his left arm swung off the cot, his fingertips hung up in midair.

But even after his cousin was outta his arms, Motor Ed could still feel him. Feather-light. Clammy skin. Angled bones. Nothin' much in between, and what was there strung tight like a tennis racket.

Motor Ed bristled, shook himself away from it, went over to stand by the guard.

"Did somebody knock 'im out?" Motor Ed asked.

The guard shook his head. Rubbed his temples. "No. That wasn't the problem this time."

"Then what was?" Motor Ed heard an engine growl in his voice.

"He's sick," the guard said. His lips tugged down at the corners. Seemed like a nice guy. For a Fed.

"Sick with what?"

"We don't know for sure," the guard said. "But I can guarantee you he fainted because he hasn't been eating,"

Motor Ed barked a short laugh. "Hasn't been _eatin_ '? That's bogus-talk, bro!" Drew ate almost as much as Motor Ed himself, though his cuz never had much to show for it.

"Oh, yeah, it's true. This dude's been off his feed for a while now," the guard said. Motor Ed followed his eyes over to Drew. His belly pulled back like it was cringing from the waist of the orange jumpsuit. Both his hands woulda fit in one of Motor Ed's palms with room to spare. His eyelids looked like they'd been stuck shut with tar. "There's hardly a thing he can keep down, and I guess he eventually stopped trying."

Motor Ed groaned in sympathy.

Still didn't explain much, though. Prison chow wasn't exactly the kinda thing that ever went down easy, but Motor Ed wouldn'ta thought it'd come up easy, either. Drew'd never really been what you'd call a picky eater.

 _Why's he been barfin' so much?_ Motor Ed thought. He stared out the little barred window, square into the sun, not at the rinky-dink stranger his cousin had turned into.

You seriously coulda cut yourself on his cheeks; they were sharper than Eddy's now. On TV shows, that always made people look old.

Not Drew.

The whiskers on his face were darker than Motor Ed's muddy brown, but they were sprinkled so thin they were barely there at all. The hair on his skinny little blue arms was all wisplike, too, and what Motor Ed could see of his ankle between the jumpsuit leg and the prison sneak wasn't much hairier than when they were kids. All of a sudden, Drew seemed like the younger one.

The guard wagged his head from side to side. "Honestly, we've been lucky to get a few bites in him on any given day since his sentence started."

Somethin' under Motor Ed's hood gave way. "Then he _is_ sick! Seriously! You need to get a doc in here!"

"Oh, we've _had_ doctors in," the guard said. "They concluded it was psychological."

Mosta the rest of the guards woulda put on some snooty voice and rushed to explain a complicated word like that. This one didn't. It felt weirdly like the first time Dad had trusted Motor Ed with one of his power tools.

"So what's scratchin' his psyche chassis?" Motor Ed asked.

No twinkle in the guard's eye. "I can't say for sure. But I'm pretty sure he's feeling guilty."

"Guilty?" That seriously made no sense to Motor Ed. Guilty was a thing the jury said you were. It wasn't a thing that you _felt_.

Not the Lipsky men, anyway.

Sure, after their first crime spree, Drew had seemed plenty upset, bein' arrested in front of his mama and all. Even cried on the way to the police station 'cause he was moody in that way only a true mastermind could be. But in typical Drew fashion, he'd been quick to stuff the whole thing in the trunk and forget about it.

Motor Ed peered back at his cousin. Any second now, he expected Drew to rev back up. His eyes to open - and blaze. His mouth to go with 'em, boomin' out orders, slammin' the guard with some insult - Drew knew some wicked-cool words that Motor Ed would never have thought of. Explain why Green Babe didn't _wanna_ be appreciated for the smokin' dish she was. To sit himself upright and be big again.

But he just kept on lyin' there. Motor Ed's fingers suddenly itched to get wrapped around a crowbar.

"Guilty 'bout what?" Motor Ed finally asked. After all, this _was_ the dude who'd once spiked every member of the football team's deodorant with some kooky chemical that made 'em stink and break out in rashes. Every member except Motor Ed, which didn't hardly matter 'cause of course they lost the game anyway. He and Drew'd had the biggest fight -

"His Diablo attack," the guard said.

Oh, yeah. Those things. Motor Ed remembered that night. He'd been piddling around in the junkyard, gone into town to get a drink, and found the streets ripped in two and sprinkled with glass. Somebody'd done such a hot number on the town that he was jealous of whoever was responsible.

Then he'd found it was a "whatever" - those kick-butt Diablo machines. They were huge but not bulky. Moved fast and smooth. Gorgeously ugly. Motor Ed trailed one the rest of the night, hidin' himself away whenever it turned around, keepin' an eye on it, secretly hopin' to come across an inactive one so he could figure out what fired up their laser arms, how you controlled the swing of 'em to flatten those buildings.

Not that it had done any good. After the signal tower was taken out, the Diablos had shriveled back up into harmless little toys, their tech locked under layers of encryption. It mighta worked to hack it, but hackin' was a sittin'-still job. Boring.

"That plan satellite-rocked!" Motor Ed exclaimed. "Why would he feel guilty about it?"

The guard's eyebrows lowered until they were parked on either side of his nose. "People were killed in that attack, Ed."

Normally, Motor Ed would have responded to that with "Sweet." There were lots of people he'd like to blow up or run over.

But it didn't seem to be makin' Drew happy. His face was scrunched into itself as if something was hurtin' him so bad he couldn't stand it. Motor Ed had only seen his cousin like that once before - back when they were in elementary school, when Uncle Richard had left.

"And he feels bad for that?" Motor Ed said.

"As well he should. He took something that he can never give back. And in turn, something was taken from him." The guard's voice was soft. Almost sorry.

"Huh." Motor Ed popped one heel off the opposite cot. He wasn't sure he'd ever felt guilty about nothin' in his whole life. But then, he'd never actually succeeded in crushing someone.

Maybe he should hold off for just a bit.

When Motor Ed gave his head a jerk back toward Drew, his mullet rustled right at the spot where the orange jumpsuit chafed at 'im. Motor Ed had the sudden urge to tear the sleeves right on out just for a glimpse of his own tattoo.

Drew's arm hovered in midair, as limp as a scarecrow's, and it didn't have enough paddin' to keep the orange fabric around it from swellin' into a tube Motor Ed could look straight up. All sorts-a purple and gray circles battered Drew's paint job. Drew's way of bruising, Motor Ed had discovered the night Red had totaled the Doom-Vee when them still inside.

 _This isn't right!_ Motor Ed thought savagely. _This bites!_ They shoulda been out, free, skippin' rocks across the pond - which Motor Ed always won - or playin' Battleship - which Drew always won.

A second guard appeared outta nowhere and rapped his nightstick against the bars. Motor Ed's pulse jumped, but the rest of him didn't. He left his body reclined against the wall and gave the second guard a slow nod.

"I'm here to escort Edward Lipsky back to his cell," the second guard said. Monotone. Dead on his feet.

"Actually, it's 'Motor Ed,' dude," Motor Ed reminded him.

The second guard's lips turned skinny, and Motor Ed stood up and shuffled toward the door to greet him. He paused for one last look over his shoulder at his cuz.

Couldn't seem to find his way back to the bars after that. The second guard banged on 'em again and snapped, "Lipsky!"

"Just a sec," Motor Ed said. "Please."

Drew's hair was all hangin' in his eyes. Motor Ed had to brush it back. His throat felt thick and tangled.

He couldn't remember the last time he'd said "please." Neither could the guards, he guessed, 'cause they dropped their jaws at each other.

One swipe of Motor Ed's hand, and Drew's hair was back to being prickly and ornery again. Turnin' and walkin' toward the door was a little bit like tryin' to drive in a blizzard without snow tires.

The second guard clanked his key in the lock and clamped a pair of handcuffs on Motor Ed's wrists. He could swear he still felt Drew's weight in his arms, even though he was carryin' nothin' - because Drew's weight wasn't that much more than nothin'. Seriously, Motor Ed had hefted tool boxes heavier'n him.

His triceps stayed sore 'round the edges all afternoon - in this dull, background type-a way - and Motor Ed couldn'ta toldja why.


End file.
